Our Mother, which art in heaven

On her blog, Something Within, Rev. Dr. Renita Weems has promised an upcoming post about gendered understandings of God, and I, for one, am waiting with bated breath to read it.

Even those of us who are enlightened women, we who don't have a problem speaking of ourselves as feminists and womanists to identify our fierce gender justice commitments, we say that god is neither male nor female, but then we proceed to speak of God as male. What we mean when we say that God is neither male nor female is that God is definitely not female.  I've talked before on the blog about the way in which God is gendered, but I wanted to explore some new angles on the topic. I'll need another day to let things marinate in my mind.

In recent years, I have become more aware of how societal hierarchies of gender, race, sexuality, etc., inform the interpretation of Christian (and other religious) texts and our understanding of the divine.  The best "history" class I ever took was led by Rev. Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. It discussed how religion has intersected with radicalism and activism for peoples of the African diaspora. It was in this class that I came to understand how styles of worship born on the African continent are demonized in Western culture. But I am also interested in the ways that the feminine has been erased in mainstream religion. And I love the way Weems has talked about her discovery of the Goddess in previous posts:

I never gave much thought to goddesses until a few years ago. Correction: I gave lots of thought to goddesses when I was working on a doctorate and had to study and write about them in order to understand the history of ancient Near Eastern religions in general, and the history of biblical religion in particular. I studied the literature on goddesses, but I didn't think about them, if that makes sense. Did the ancient Hebrews once include one or more goddesses in official or unofficial worship? Probably. Did the move toward a monotheistic religion by the Hebrews around the 8th century b.c.e, with its belief in one, supreme, male deity lead to a rejection of the feminine divine? Most likely.

And then one summer I picked up Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon and read it. The scales fell off. I understood what the fuss was all about. Mists is a retelling of the King Arthur legend(s) from the point of view of the women characters, most notably Morgaine who has to defend her indigenous matriarchal religious heritage against impossible odds. Bradley's novel managed to do what volumes of scholarly tomes could not. I understood what was missing in my faith and what had been lost in centuries of attempts by Judeo-Christian tradition to stamp out all vestiges of any belief in the feminine divine. I understood why in lots of societies, then and now, goddesses are often connected with agricultural societies – where the earth, Mother Earth, is a very strong focus. Read more...

So, heads up on this upcoming discussion on Something Within. I know it is going to be good.

For more on this topic, check out my review of the site, Jesus is Love, which featured non-traditional portrayals of Joseph, Mary, Jesus and other Biblical characters.