“And the Lord said…” preached the priest at the parish I was
attending, and suddenly, everything changed.
“Why does it have to be “the lord”?” I thought. “We know God
is above and beyond gender, but I only ever hear God referred to using male
pronouns and male terms. Can God be Mother as well as Father? Can God be …
Lady?” That thought was the beginning of the seismic shift in my theology, my
practice, and my life.
Until that moment, I had lived my faith in a conventional
(but hopefully courageous) way. I studied English Literature and Religious
Studies in my BA, and then went on to complete a Bachelor of Ministries degree
from the-then Bible College of New Zealand, with a focus on spiritual formation.
During my time at BCNZ, I returned to my Anglican roots, and was Confirmed as
an Anglican not long after I married my husband in 2001.
I joined the Third Order Franciscans not long after we
married, and I transferred my vows to a Benedictine community a few years
later, as I found the Benedictine vows of stability, conversion of life, and
obedience to God a much easier fit for a married woman than poverty, chastity
and obedience! Our daughter, then aged 4, assisted me at my vows by vesting me
in the Benedictine habit – she has grown up with a mother who works fulltime,
is married and a nun, and is quite happy with all of that, as is my husband who
is my strongest supporter!
Fast-forward five years. My small family were attending a
small Anglican church and living our lives as a youngish couple with a small
child. Everything was seemingly normal. I was reading voraciously, as is my
lifelong habit, and one of the books I read around that time was Sue Monk
Kidd’s The Dance of the Dissident
Daughter. And then, from left field, comes this thought: why do I never
hear God addressed by female names? And following on from that, what is wrong
with being female, that (according to Augustine and other male early church
leaders) means women cannot be seen as imago
Dei, fully created in the image of God as
women?
St Augustine said that,
“Woman does not possess the image
of God in herself but only when taken together with the male who is her head,
so that the whole substance is one image. But when she is assigned the role as
helpmate, a function that pertains to her alone, then she is not the image of
God. But as far as the man is concerned, he is by himself alone the image of
God just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together
into one.”
I dived into the most serious theological and historical
study I had ever done (including the six years I spent doing my degrees) –
certainly the most fraught. This felt like a life-or-death situation – the life
or death of my ability to respect myself as a woman, the life or death of my
ability to connect with the divine.
Is there historical and theological support for calling God
by female names?
To my great delight (and relief), there is ample biblical,
theological and historical evidence for addressing the Most Holy by female
names. I discovered that the translations made of the Bible had frequently
changed female names for people, as well as mistranslating female terms and
names for the divine. For example, the ancient Hebrew “El Shaddai” is usually
translated “The Almighty”, assuming that the term derives from shadad, burly or powerful, or shadah, “mountains”. However, many
Hebrew scholars now understand that El Shaddai derives from Shad meaning breast – El Shaddai
therefore translates as the Many-Breasted One. The ancient habit of translating
the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name for God, as “LORD”, further reinforced
the incorrect assumption that only male language was acceptable to name the
Most High.
The usage of “Father/abba” to relate to the Holiest is only
used 4 times in Mark, 15 in Luke, 49 in Matthew, and 109 times in John (the
Gospels were written in that order, from around 60-120AD) - surely a sign of a
growing community usage, rather than Jesus’ actual words. Given the
Gospels had earlier sources now lost to us, it is possible that the term
“father” was used infrequently by Jesus, and was then latched onto by his
followers as a quiet and subconscious way of reinforcing the Graeco-Roman
worldview of men as pater familias,
the head of the household, and its use encouraged and strengthened through the
years by those reinforcing male leadership and power.
I came to understand that, if we only use male names for
God, then that subtly implies that only men are made in God’s image. When we
use only male terminology for God and for people in our liturgy, worship,
preaching and teaching, we subtly reinforce this incorrect, outdated
understanding of God and imply that maleness is “normal” and somehow being
female means we are less.
Theologically, we understand that God is omnipotent,
omnipresent, and omniscient, and as omnipotent and all-powerful, God will not
be limited by gender, and nor should our language for God put God’s power and
presence in a box of limited male terms. St Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)
called God Mother in her sermons; so too did Julian of Norwich (c1342-1416).
Yet despite extensive biblical, historical and theological evidence, including
discussions within our own Anglican tradition in New Zealand and overseas over
the last 50 years or more, we still continue to primarily name God by male
names.
I began to look closely at the liturgy and Bible
translations we use. I translated the entire Benedictine daily prayer cycle
into gender neutral and expansive terms (where female and male names are used
equally) for my own use as a Lenten devotion in 2014. I then tackled A New Zealand Prayer Book/He Karakia
Mihinare o Aotearoa. I wrote a version of the Eucharistic liturgy p.404
that removed all male terms for God, replacing them with female or
gender-neutral terms. Not being a priest, I was not able to use this, but it
was an exercise in trying to find out what it might feel like to be in a
liturgy where God was addressed openly as Sophia, Mother, Lady, She. I began to
look for versions of the Bible where the names for God were not changed, and
discovered both The Inclusive Bible,
and even more powerful, The Divine
Feminine Version of the New Testament, and began to experience the
scriptures with a new voice.
I found that I could not keep silent about the explosion of
love that I had felt since I had openly embraced calling God by female names –
my favourites being She Who Is, following Elizabeth Johnson’s book of the same
name that was the beginning of the strong theological backbone I needed, Sophia
(the Greek translation of Hokhmah or Wisdom), and Mother or Lady. I began to
think about Jesus as the incarnation of Holy Sophia in the continuation of the
Wisdom tradition, which a lot of scholars had identified, and reflected that
the Holy Child could be thought of as the Child of the Mother. I began to
discuss my discovery of She Who Is with others.
And that’s where things got complicated.
There was a lot of support, often from older Christian
friends that had gone through the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and
1970s, several of whom had been closely involved with the Anglican Church and
the Prayer Book Commission. There was also stonewalling, accusations of heresy,
and refusal to engage with the theology and history, particularly from some
male priests who clung to patriarchy like a ragged, worn-out old blanket that
they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, let go of.
I tried everything. I spoke, with love, to friends and
acquaintances at churches – my own and others. I spoke with my husband and
daughter, who have both journeyed with me on this discovery of She Who Is Godde
(the term I now prefer for the divine – it is an old medieval spelling for the
divine, and is completely neutral with no male connotations such as “God” has).
I spoke with passion to our churchwardens and parish priests, describing my
journey and trying to engage with them over the theological and historical
information I had gleaned through at least five years of intensive study,
prayer and reflection.
I felt unwelcome in regular church liturgy because I only
ever heard Godde named by male names, and that no longer named my experience of
her. I changed the words when I was singing hymns (first resigning from the
church choir) and participating in liturgy, substituting she for he so I could
be present in church. When I used a female name for Godde, Sophia, Holy Wisdom,
when leading intercessions one Sunday in 2016, I was formally censured by my
parish priest and removed from all rosters in the parish where I, and my
dangerous ideas about Godde, might be expressed publicly. Patriarchy was
rampant.
I did find allies – people that felt the same as me, who had
sought Sophia/Wisdom and found her, as we are enjoined to do in Proverbs and
Wisdom. They helped me keep up my courage. In the end, in desperation, I sought
a meeting with our People’s Warden asking what I could do, as our parish priest
completely refused to engage in conversation about this topic with us. The
Warden recommended we put motions to our parish AGM – which we did, seeking
removal of male terms when the whole of humanity was meant, and seeking
education for the parish and changes in our language for Godde in church.
So how did it all turn out? Well, the parish priest would
not allow the motions on the naming of Godde to even be put at the AGM (giving
us no warning of this so we couldn’t even amend the motions) and refusing to
allow discussion on the naming of Godde. I wasn’t even allowed to speak to the
motion I was trying to put (which had been notified to the parish according to
the correct protocol, three weeks before the AGM). The priest tried to
undermine the motion on naming of people by putting a much weaker motion from
the chair, but at least there is some intention to remove terms such as
“mankind” and “man/men” when they are intended to refer to all people. The
motion on educating the parish on the female names for Godde was passed, after
my husband spoke with calm eloquence, identifying that his experience of the
journey was that knowing Godde by male-only terms was missing so much of the
richness of Godde’s nature.
And where does that leave me? I am still reading, still
researching – trying to identify what it might do to the way the church treats
people, the way Christians treat people, if we viewed Godde as our Mother. How
might we respect her world, if we thought about it as birthed by her? How might
we show love one to another, if all of our people could see and hear of Godde
in terms that show that, no matter what flesh you are born into, you are fully
born and bearing Godde’s image? I am still lighting candles of hope in her name,
praying in the stillness of the night sky, walking the beach and hearing the
water crash on the shore, filling her footprints left there by some other
person who walked before me and carries her name.
I am calling out her name in the world, and naming
patriarchy and misuse of male power wherever I see it.
I
cannot un-see or un-know what I now know, the experiences of her love I have
had. My image of Godde is forever changed – much bigger, wider, deeper, more
beautiful, richer. I am a different person since I encountered Godde the
Mother, Godde the Creatrix, Godde the Incarnate Child, Godde Holy Wisdom. I
have found my image was in her all along – I just couldn’t see it, because the
language we use for God told me that only men were made in God’s image. Women
were only mothers, not fathers – but now Godde is my Mother I can find myself in her.
