God Our Mother
The ways in which we speak of God matter intensely. They affect the way we think and feel about ourselves and about other people, as well as our perceptions of God. Although we know that God is beyond our powers of imagination, we need to use images to describe our experiences of the divine; images that say “God is a bit like this thing which I do understand.” The important part of this phrase is “a bit” — we describe God by a comparison, then admit that it is inadequate. The problem with our metaphors is that we become set in the use of only a few of them, and it seems as if we have an adequate description of God. In traditional Christianity we use images of God as a father and the incarnate Christ as “his” son almost exclusively. This means not only that we limit our understanding of God and make the feminine second rate, but that unconsciously we think of God as actually male, even though when thinking about this we know it to be untrue.
Why does the church still describe God almost always in masculine images? I can find no positive reasons for continuing to use exclusively masculine images of God (negative ones, such as feminine images not “feeling right”, will be discussed later). Certainly the Bible says that Jesus sometimes addressed God as “abba” when praying, and told the disciples to address God as “our father” in his example of a prayer. But Jesus was a Jew brought up in a tradition where God is so different from humans that the divine name, even, is unsayable. It is highly unlikely, then, that he would have used “abba” or “father” to describe a concrete image of God. Coming from such a background Jesus could not have intended such an image to be completely adequate to describe God’s nature or our relationship with God. More likely, he used it to increase people’s feelings of intimacy with God. In this context, it is counter-productive to use it so extensively that it makes people feel excluded — not just feminists, but people whose relationships with their own fathers make this an unhelpful image. Also, words do not exist in a social vacuam, and words which were appropriate in Jesus’ time may no longer have the same resonance today.
A frequently raised objection to the use of feminine images for God is that it is near, if not actual, paganism, or goddess worship. This objection is quite worrying in terms of the church’s current perception of God. If the use of feminine metaphors necessarily means a sexually female deity, then the conventional use of male metaphors for God means that at present we perceive God as sexually male. This is both untrue and idolatrous.
A perhaps more unconscious reason why people are uncomfortable with female images of God concerns the qualities with which women are commonly associated. Whatever their rational ideas about the role and characteristics of women (if such things are thought to exist), many people’s unconscious ideas associate women with weakness, with sexual attractiveness being important, and with a lack of reasoned, ordered thinking — “feminine intuition”. These qualities are felt to be inappropiate to God who is usually described as ‘almighty’, and felt to be without sexuality and a bringer of order. Leaving aside the question of whether such characteristics should be associated with only one gender, I wish to argue that such characteristics are not incompatible with what we can understand of God’s nature. The cruxifiction story surely shows God to be completely vunerable, and Jesus in the gospels has moments of weakness which are not condemned (weeping at the death of Lazarus, feeling his strength go out of him when the haemorrhaging woman touched his cloak, among others). The image of God as a lover is seldom used nowadays despite its prominence in the Old Testament, and in pre-Reformation spirituality. But in a society which has largely discarded the association of sex with sin or ‘baser nature’, God as a lover may be a helpful metaphor. In traditional imagery, God is usually associated with the qualities of light, order and reason. There may also be a need for a God who is associated with darkness, mysteriousness and irrationality, since much of our experience of God is in these terms. By using images of God which include these ‘feminine’ characteristics we actually gain a better, because more wide ranging, idea of God.
The difficulty with our language that tries to describe God is that we are attempting the impossible. We are trying to define that which is by definition indescribable. We use images which were intended as metaphors as if they were literally true. God is NOT our father, not even A father. Jesus is NOT God’s son. These are (meant to be) helpful metaphors to give us some inkling of the nature of their relationship. But they are not definitions, and so they are not the only possible ways to describe that relationship. Alternatives are not just “feminine” ones, such as mother — daughter but things like God as a gardener, a lover or a shield. These images are all biblical ones which we have lost, or use only occasionaly as a second rate alternative to father and son. By limiting our mental image of God to a father and a son, we are losing vital ideas about the nature of the divine. The exclusive use of this image is also bad because the language we use in worship affects not only the way we think of God, but our perception of the rest of the world and other people. If we exclude the feminine from our perception of God then we are in effect saying that women are a less good model of the divine than men, and hence that they are a lesser part of creation.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of using feminine images of God is that which is often cited against them; that they don’t feel quite right, that they are uncomfortable, that they “get in the way”. This is a very good thing. We cannot understand God; we cannot have a complete image of the divine, and to feel that we are actually addressing God when we call “him” father is dangerous and near idolotrous. Traditional images of God feel as if they are transparent, as if we are actually able to have an adequate picture of the God to whom we pray. But this is not the case, we are actually praying to an image of our own construction, which we have forgotten is only an image. By using male, female, and non gendered pictures of God in our prayer and worship we remind ourselves of the inadequacy of our images in describing the divine. At the same time, we enrich our experience of God by including a far wider range of metaphors, and confirm our commitment to the absolute equality of worth of men and women.