Plain speaking and a bit of digital spring cleaning

Regular visitors will notice that the blog has had a bit of a facelift. It had had the same layout and template for a couple of years so it seemed appropriate to have a little spring cleaning.

Some of you may wonder about the slightly changed title: "Pachyderm: home by a different way". I am still drawing inspiration from elephants, those wonderful, enigmatic, courageous creatures of the wild, but this is my blog and my story, and I am exploring new ways of being and travelling. Hints of this have already started to show on here, but let us be plain. I have begun to find Sophia, the Wisdom who is God, She who Is, who gave the Christ to us as her greatest gift. I am slowly trusting and allowing myself to travel with her, and listening as she begins to make herself known to me.

The God of my ancestors-in-faith, Hildegard, Therese, Thomas Merton, and many others, has slowly led me to understand that the image of the god that gets handed out in church is a lie. God is not male. God is not exclusively masculine. The Holy Spirit is Holy Sophia. The Creator sang for joy as she built the world. The god I have been shown in church over the last 25 years or more is a fragment and a construct of a patriarchial world that dominated women's experience and buried our stories, hiding the essential truth of God as both/and: God beyond gendered language and experience.

However, for me, here, now, I need to hear from the Creatrix, who gave the Christ-Sophia, who brought forth life from the darkness and beauty from the seed. I need to listen and hear that tiny voice that has been stifled throughout my life and in the life of the church, and find the loving face of the Holy One who sings new words in my woman's heart. I need to hear her voice, and allow myself to hear it, and trust that I can find the God who is love, above and beyond all things, who draws near to me in my own experiences, who made me in her image and likeness, and who shows her face to the world through me.

The image of God is far more than two men and a bird. And I intend to discover some of those lost and lovely names for God facing us that have been intentionally hidden from me.

So there you have it. Plain speaking for something that is anything but plain in experience.