Religious Scholar

The two quotes that appear at the beginning of this Web site use the masculine pronoun in reference to the Divine. Thoreau and Eckhart did not view God as specifically male, but rather used the language conventions of their time. However, in our own time, the default to male terminology and iconography in reference to spirituality is under attack, and rightly so.  All of the great religious traditions hold that Spirit is without gender. By expressing Spirit in exclusively male terms, girls and women for millennia have been relegated to a second-class status in the world of organized religion. This is not a good thing, but I am not convinced that a 180-degree turnaround in which the Divine is perceived exclusively as female is necessarily the solution.

A dozen or so years ago, the idea of the Divine Feminine moved from theological circles into American popular culture. Running with wolves, Sophia, wise women and other female-centered expressions of spirituality conceptually entered society's religious dialogue. Certainly, the Divine Feminine was not an unfamiliar concept.  In the West, the Blessed Virgin Mary and many Catholic and Orthodox saints have inspired worship and served as role models for hundreds of years. Museums display pre-Columbian fertility goddesses from Central and South America. Female deities and saints from India, Africa and Eastern Asia are depicted in decorative arts as well as in textbooks on religious diversity.

One can understand the resentment many women, myself included, feel at being marginalized by the religious mainstream. However, I am not convinced that a completely female-centered spiritual consciousness is the answer for all women. The Mother Goddess' appeal is rooted in the presumption that women have positive memories of their own mothers.  Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The Secret Life of Bees and a writer on religious themes, writes about Tillie Olson's short story, "I Stand Here Ironing," in which a mother wishes that her daughter could have a better life. But not every mother is self-sacrificing and encouraging. For every mother who says, "I will help you become everything you want to be," there is one who shrieks, "Give me that book! You're going to take care of me, you miserable little bitch!" For every mother who urges her daughter to go to college, there is one who rips up the college application and snorts, "Over my dead body!"  For every mother who takes a child to the library, there is one who smashes her child's possessions and slaps her awake in the middle of the night screaming that the daughter and her father are conspiring against her.  There is a reason we have books like Sybil and Mommy Dearest.

Indeed, for some women, the only escape from the horror and control of matriarchy is through the intervention of a completely different sort of person, perhaps a teacher or guidance counselor.  Just as a person may have more successful treatment with a psychotherapist of the opposite sex,  a girl or woman who has lived under the thumb of an oppressive mother may find herself drawn to male role models.  Images of a female divine being may not appeal to such women, who associate female authority with repression and pain. What is more difficult to understand is how males seem to prefer masculine depictions of the deity and to profess profound love for a God who is an authoritarian Father and a self-sacrificing Son. In cultures where male independence is prized and where male love of males has until recently been looked on with suspicion, isn't it strange that men's passionate expressions of love and longing have been focused almost exclusively on masculine depictions of the Formless One? Wouldn't it make more sense for males who have not had a problem with an overbearing mother to worship the Divine through female images such as Mother Nature, Mary, Kuan Yin or Saraswati?

But I am not a psychologist, and leave such ruminations to experts in that field.  The subject of the Feminine Divine is larger than psychology or theology for that matter, and affects all who have an interest in thinking about the ways in which we make the genderless spirit into something comprehensible to our bodies and minds.  For many people, the very word "feminine" is problematic. Women who grew up in my generation invariably learned that masculine was good, feminine was bad. As a young girl, my passion was music. Music referred to as feminine was weak and insipid. Music needed to be powerful and virile, even in its softest expression. The music of Chopin, for example--a composer known for his physical frailty, who played the piano so softly that listeners had to strain to hear the notes--this music was characterized as masculine, robust, powerful. The greatest composers--Beethoven, Bach--were towers (masculine term) of virility and strength.  Not weak, withdrawing, recumbent, all characteristics of femininity.

About 25 years ago, I volunteered to be interviewed by a middle-aged psychology student for her project on women's self images. The interview proceeded smoothly until she asked me if I thought I was feminine.  Images of pink toenails and poodles sprang horribly to mind!  "No, of course not!" I protested. "  I could tell she was intrigued.  After all, I sat before her in a pastel skirt suit, my hair neatly brushed, wearing lipstick, pantyhose and earrings. I was married, had a child and spoke softly. Yet inside was a creature who balked at the charge of being weak and withdrawn.  My self-image was associated with words such as "power," "achievement," "independence."  Call me anything, I seemed to say, but don't call me feminine!  Such was the impact of society's debasement of the meaning of "feminine" in the early 1980s.

Whether because of this distaste for images of feminine insufficiency or because they had a negative experience of maternal authoritarianism, many women dissatisfied with the religious status quo nonetheless shy away from embracing the Goddess.   Some have embraced pagan traditions such as Wicca which offers a God-Goddess combo.  Others have rethought the Christian Trinity to be the Father, Mother and Holy Spirit, or some other permutation (I like the Parent, Child and Holy Spirit).  Yet others have elevated the notion of Sophia or Wisdom, a tradition which predates Christianity in both the classical Greek and Jewish traditions.  It is even possible to view Christ as an androgynous Being. You know the type: a slim, long-haired youth who plays a flute and pets the rabbit. (All that fuss about the moneychangers could have been invented to make him more appealing in a macho culture.) I know of one church which has a small statue of Christ that looks like a Ken doll (Barbie's consort), though I think this is taking the idea a bit too far.

Clearly, there is no one solution for women seeking to know the Divine through an image they can relate to.  But there are options and alternatives. For myself, I do not want to bond with a group of naked people of either sex in a cave in New Mexico under the first full moon of autumn, nor do I want to have anything whatsoever to do with drumming. On the other hand I have color postcards of the smiling Kuan Yin on my office corkboard. The Feminine Divine has a well deserved place in world spirituality, though like everything else, Her influence and impact on individuals is not uncomplicated.  A(h wo)men!