Progressive Christianity / LGBTQ+ / Gender Issues
Ungendering Deity, or Can We Still Have a Beer with God?
Meggan Watterson’s book on the divine feminine and a congregation’s vote on gender pronouns
Dear Meggan Watterson,
Forgive me — please, please — but the title for your 2019 book of essays is a touch cheesy. We might even agree on that.
The book itself, however — Mary Magdalene: Revealed — is a rewarding journey into the divine feminine. Kudos, congratulations, and thank you for sharing your personal spiritual path with us.
Today, let me focus on one thing that particularly spoke to me from your essay, “Grandma Betty’s Eyes” —
It’s not that the idea of god the father was so upsetting to me, it was that it was so incomplete. god as the father and Jesus as his only son made zero sense. It just felt like one side of a far more inclusive and radical love story. we have the masculine, the male, and the divine; but there is also the feminine, the female, and the human.
I confess: I have been on the fence about God and gender for years
Even back in my divinity school days, my peers and I had these discussions in class. Some peers had bad experiences with violent, uncommitted, or other types of toxic fathers; the last thing they wanted was to pray to a father figure.
Yet others argued that the same thing can be said of some people’s experiences with abusive mothers.
We outlined a non-gendered image of God. Then we realized this was wholly unsatisfying.
I argued that most of us want to be able to feel close to our image of God. We want to feel we could snuggle up with on a couch, or perhaps share a beer with God.
When I said that, I was making a huge assumption. I’ve since come to learn that many people do NOT have or want a personal relationship with the divine.
But being a human being, I assumed in the absence of other evidence, that my opinions were universal.
Back to gender
What kind of gender-free verbiage could we use? We wondered.
This was the 1990s, a time before much of the gender-neutral pronouns and titles had become part of our daily lives.
Back then, being gendered in one way or another was part of a person’s identity. It seemed difficult to know anyone, deity included, without this basic data. This line of thinking is how we ended up with lots of our images of God — beard, throne and all — which none of us actually believe is representative of the divine.
And yet, gender stubbornly remained.
Part of this was because calling God “it” seemed to denature the divine into something mechanical. Mammals, birds, fish, plants, and almost everything that is alive has gender. Envisioning God as non-gendered — back in the 1990s — placed the divine outside the Venn circle of “things that are alive.”
In the current decade we are aware of gender-indeterminate people who prefer the personal pronouns “it and its.” Decades ago, however, the concept that gender is a spectrum, not an on-off switch, wasn’t on our cultural radar yet.
Thirty years later, the problem remains
This past summer our congregation met to vote on joining a new conference. Our old conference didn’t fit us anymore — we are generally in favor of LGBTQ+ weddings and clergy, while our old conference was not.
After the conference vote, the chat turned toward the use of masculine imagery in our service.
Just like my divinity school peers had years ago, some disliked the traditional masculine liturgical language. Others had pleasant memories of using the “Our Father” since childhood, and wanted to keep it.
At the time, I was leaning toward the later.
I’m as sentimental as a person reasonably can be. I remembered standing up in church as a young girl, in between my parents, and praying the Lord’s Prayer, singing the Gloria Patri, and reciting the Nicene Creed, each of which call God “Father” again and again.
Yet, decades of reticence fell away as I read this passage
It’s here in “Grandma Betty’s Eyes.” You, Meggan Watterson, were describing passing the light from candle to candle, person to person, during the Christmas service.
Here I was wedged next to my Grandma Betty, a being who had actually, physically “begotten” a son with her own body. A being who radiates and exudes the kind of light these tiny lights can only symbolize. And yet there is no word of her in the story. There’s no goddess, no sister, no mother (who births with her actual body in a very human, non-immaculate way.) I wonder, ad I wonder why more people don’t wonder, “what god would be if god was also a She?” — Meggan Watterson, Mary Magdalene Revealed
Damn, yes!
The virgin part of Mary’s story has always just been a throw-away.
Of course she wasn’t a virgin — certainly not after she had gave birth to the brothers of Jesus the Gospels mention. And even beforehand. Virgin births appear in mythology and religion from around the world. It’s simply a way of trying to make Jesus’ birth seem important, not something we have to accept as fact. In fact, a lot of scribes in the early centuries of the Christian faith went out of their way to change the scriptures to suit their preference of a virgin birth.
So, centuries later, we have been stuck with that myth. Why? The message seems to be that non-virginity — on a woman’s part — is gross, ungodly, filthy. The only way a woman can be “clean” is to be a virgin.
What kind of a messed up message is that, when the world is populated and maintained by women who are not remain virgins?
Sex, reproduction, and the wet, sticky and painful process of childbirth is what keeps the world populated. There’s no holier thing.
So where does all this talk of virgins leave women? Tacitly ignoring the myth — most of us — and marching on.
But more importantly, where does it leave the little girls, the teens, the young women? And children in general — should they look back on their origins and birth as something shameful? What does that tell them about their future, about their own healthy sex lives, about their relationships, about pregnancy and giving birth?
We can thank various churchmen over the centuries from those at the Counsel of Nicaea — one of the most influential sausagefests in history— St. Jerome and his coterie of female co-dependents, and the women-should-sit-down-and-shut-up author of 1st Timothy whom most contemporary scholars say emphatically was not Paul.
But I digress.
How did the vote at our church go, in terms of keeping or dismissing masculine language in the liturgy?
We decided to split it down the middle.
- Some of our language would be kept masculine — such as in the Lord’s Prayer, the “Our Father.”
- Some would be neutralized, so that the Gloria Patri is now the “Praise God.”
Dropping the “Father,” and “him,” it goes, Praise God from whom all blessings flow / Praise God all creatures here below / Praise God for what Love has done / Creator, Christ, and Spirit, one.
How easy was that?
And I’ve been noticing feminine pronouns slipping into sermons, from time to time. More of that to come, I hope.
So, thank you, Meggan Patterson, for changing my mind
You’re making it easier for those of us sitting at home to have a more feminine-friendly Christian faith.
You’re also helping us in the pews & pulpits to have a better, fuller, and more authentic experience.
Respectfully,
P.S.: Your recommendations for Jean-Ives Leloup’s translation of the Gospel of Philip really turned me around. Worth the cover price, right there!
Enthusiasts: If you want to throw some love toward this writer, please consider buying me a coffee — that’s love in its steamy, caffeinated form. Many thanks, my friends!