In the church at which I spent most of my childhood, there was this mural on the wall over the altar. In a grand arc, with art deco sun rays. The words “Come to me all who are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” And at the very top of the arc was a picture of a man. This man was wearing a white robe and had long white hair and a long white beard. He was glowing with pastel colored light and had his arms out in a gesture of welcome. Come to me. Now this man looked kind of like Jesus, but was completely different from the pictures of the young man with long hair and a beard that were ubiquitous in that and other churches. There was a family resemblance. It was like an older Jesus, a Jesus who hadn’t died in his thirties… it was like Jesus’ father.

This picture unquestionably expresses something about God, is an expression of a certain mentality, a certain theology. As a teenager, with a budding sense of my own relationship with God, this picture bordered on blasphemy. Imaging the unimaginable was a kind of idolatry, to my righteous adolescent mind. With a budding sense also of what patriarchal religion and culture looked like, this picture encapsulated everything that I found unacceptable in my family and school and religious life.

The system of male domination has historically been kept in place by a male God. As the feminist theologian Mary Daly so aptly put it, if God was a man, then men were God. A religious system that preached a male God whose son is the savior of the world reinforced male privilege and power by sacralizing it—making it sacred and making domination by men seem natural, God-given, and inevitable. In the church that I grew up in, this was bolstered by an all male clergy.

But there was another aspect of the mural in my childhood church that was questionable. The God of this church was high above everything else, remote, and looking down on us all. We often talk about God being “up there,” we talk about a “Higher” Power, we speak of God living in the heavens, by which we mean the sky. Within patriarchy, it is not simply men who dominate women, it is an entire system based on domination and hierarchy, that is, some have power over others, some are on top others. Human society is stratified into classes, with some ruling over others, one ethnic group over others, and all of humanity itself wielding power over the natural world.

In my youthful excitement, I rejected this image of God and the very church upon whose wall this image was painted. I was influenced very much by the feminist critiques of sexist religion, as I made sense of my own experiences. I wanted the God of my understanding to be not so anthropomorphic. I began to imagine God as the life force, that power of being in nature and within myself, that force that made seeds sprout and plants bloom. I replaced power-over with an innate sense of power-with and power-within. I often thought of God as Spirit, and associated Spirit with the wind and the flame and that sense of connection to others and all things, the animating, vital part of myself that connected me to all other warm breathing things. This vitality was both within and outside myself, a thread born from within me that connected me to all around me.

This was how I experienced God’s presence. And it is here that an authentically lived religious faith begins—with an encounter of the divine. We start with the feeling of awe and astonishment, wonder and amazement before the deep powers of being within us and within creation. The experience of God’s presence is something powerful. Often words do not and cannot express the experience; it is indescribable, ineffable, beyond words. But to be human is to be a creature that transforms experience into language and when it comes to the divine, our speech is destined to fail. To speak of God is to speak in signs, metaphoric language that will always be faltering and incomplete. As the second century Christian theologians said: A God who is comprehensible is not God.

So all of our talk about God is provisional, awaiting more understanding and more experience of God’s presence. All theology is symbolic and metaphoric, works of poetic imagination grounded in our direct experience of the mystery at the heart of the universe. Symbols must never be confused with what they represent. This form of literalism is the ruin of authentically lived religious faith. It turns the symbols into God, instead of allowing them to be windows into the divine milieu. Symbols and metaphors are ways of allowing the ineffable to be grasped by the mind, however imperfectly, of bringing the divine near to us, to our human way of knowing.

And that is the paradox of God. God is totally transcendent, and yet near to us, utterly other from us yet completely intimate with us, unknown and yet well known. Our scripture readings this morning emphasize this element of biblical faith: the intimacy of a creating and creative God dwelling with and among his people. And God can be and is present with us, God’s presence having more the quality of a person than of an abstract “life force” or even “Spirit.” To speak of God only in impersonal terms is to render God an object, an “It” instead of a “You.” Our relationship with God is a personal relationship, a relatedness like that of persons.

And so as I matured in my faith and in my understanding, I began to understand the symbolic language of God as a person. I understood the impulse behind that old man with a white beard high up above me as a child growing up in a patriarchal church. It is an attempt, always partial no matter what they say, to express that personal quality of God, to allow God to be You and not It. For the ancients, making sense of their powerful experiences of the divine, they used the kinds of metaphors that best expressed what they were getting at. In their time and place power was hierarchical and men were powerful. So to express the tremendous mysterious power of God’s presence they chose political metaphors like Lord and King. The early Christians co-opted and subverted Roman political language and spoke of Jesus as Savior as well as Lord, Christ, Son of God. In a patriarchal, father-ruled culture, God was the ultimate Father.

Such metaphors for God are perfectly adequate, however they are not the only ways of imagining the unimaginable. Lord, king, savior, master, and father can not be the only way to speak of God (or Jesus for that matter).

How we imagine God is terribly important, because how we imagine God shapes the way God is worshipped. To imagine a controlling, jealous, judgmental God is to spawn controlling, jealous and judgmental religion. To imagine a God spoken only in masculine terms is to spawn a religion that sacralizes the male, rationalizing an all male clergy and subordinate position for women. Because religion orients us to our place in the universe, imagining a remote, impersonal, dispassionate God provides a rationale for how we will be with our neighbor—including our non-human neighbor.

How to symbolize God’s creative, transforming power? How to symbolize God’s intimate presence, God’s connective Spirit? How to speak of God in ways that foster care of the Earth, and the creation of a just, sustainable, egalitarian social order? What about symbols that speak of God as she?

Beginning in the early 1970s, many cultural feminists in North America began to create forms of religion, forms of spiritual expression that gave voice to their desire to create symbols and metaphors for the divine that affirmed women’s experience, women’s bodies, as sites for the sacred. They began to create forms of spiritual expression that symbolized the divine nature of their personal power. These women turned to ancient history, to the period before the written word known by our historians as “pre-history.”

At the dawn of human civilization, God was imagined in female terms—the Goddess. Southern and southwest Asia, the Mediterranean, northern and western Europe—all were locales of Goddess worship in the Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. She was imagined as a Great Mother associated with childbirth, menarche, fecundity, and agriculture. The earliest examples of human art are the so-called Venus figurines of Europe that depict large female figures with voluptuous hips and breasts. In myth and song, she regenerated the life-force and created the universe. In the Neolithic period she was revered as the Great Goddess, the supreme deity that ruled over other gods, goddesses and animistic spirits. In later periods, she was more like a ruler, a queen or lady in civilizations that began to have royalty and hierarchic social structures. She was called the Queen of Heaven, Lady of the Universe, Her Holiness. She had names like Isis, Astarte, Hakate, Demeter, Kali, and Inanna.

The ancient Hebrew people were a nation amidst these civilizations. Their notion of God was unique in that Yahweh was utterly transcendent, though in many other ways he was like the male gods of antiquity. In the Hebrew Bible, we find all kinds references to Asherah, the Canaanite Goddess. Stories abound of her worship among the Hebrew people and how this is stamped out by Yahweh’s heroes. Archeological finds in Palestine include altars at which Yahweh and Asherah are honored as the God and Goddess, divine consorts.

When the Hebrew people were camped in the wilderness, and before they built the Temple in Jerusalem, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies, traveled with the people. The altar and candelabras and offerings of loaves traveled in a tent called the Mishkan, which means to dwell, to abide, to rest among. The Shekinah is a Jewish symbol of God’s indwelling presence among the people, God’s compassion and closeness. The Shekinah, a feminine word, is spoken of in feminine terms. She is the feminine face of the biblical God. The Shekinah is God as She-Who-Dwells-Within. The term Spirit, in Hebrew ruach, in Greek pneuma, both feminine nouns, is also conceived in feminine terms, though rarely personified as such. The wisdom literature of the Bible, especially the book of Proverbs speaks of Wisdom personified as a woman. The Wisdom of God, like the Spirit of God, invites, provokes, creates, transforms. She changes what she touches, and what she touches changes. Wisdom, in Greek, is Sophia, a biblical feminine name for God.

Art historians, archeologists, anthropologists and writers of the feminist movement in the 1970s began to uncover a rich history of female sacred figures. Feminists interested in creating new forms of religion began to interpret and re-interpret these ancient symbols, metaphors and myths. The ancient Goddesses, and the Great Goddess herself began to be explored as metaphors for contemporary women’s unfolding, the unfolding of women’s being and power. Ritual circles sprang up across North America, and later across Western Europe, as feminists created a new religious movement; a movement that has regenerated and transformed the way religion is lived out and experienced today. Religious feminism is a current renewal movement, a current of renewal, within Judaism and Christianity in addition to the feminist spirituality movement. Over the last thirty years, Jewish, Christian and Goddess feminists have refined a thealogy that expresses a new understanding of the divine and of the divine-human relationship. Thealogy encompasses science, the hypothesis that life on the planet is so interconnected that the earth is in actual fact a living system, a living whole. This hypothesis is named for Gaia, the ancient Greek earth Goddess. Thealogy is informed increasingly by not only the sciences and the arts, but by process philosophy and theology.

The notion that anybody can stand outside the interconnected and mutually dependent web of life and not be affected by it or participate in it, is a peculiarly modern idea. Enlightenment thinkers like Descartes and Newton established a view of the universe that was mechanistic. All of the earth was like a great machine, and could be broken down to its component parts and be understood. There was nothing that science could not explain. The universe was a huge mechanism. Religious thinkers of the eighteenth century saw God as great clockmaker, creating this elaborate mechanism and then letting it run. God is a clockmaker who stands outside the universe he created, never interfering in it. The scientific method and rationalism came to be the way the moderns understood the world. As we modern humans understood the world better, we could improve the world that God created and left in our hands. Human beings could cultivate not only the world, but the self, ever improving and progressing toward perfection.

In our increasingly post-modern world, a God who stands apart, distant and unrelated to the world is no longer adequate. Science itself is telling a different story, beginning with Albert Einstein and moving into contemporary physics and cosmology. The world as we are coming to understand it today is a system, a network of relatedness and mutuality. The life sciences stress the ecology of biodiversity, an intricate balance of species that sustain and support life on this planet. We imagine our connections and communications with others these days as a World Wide Web, networking with others electronically. And with these new understandings, new ways of experiencing the world comes a new way of imagining the divine.

God is not over and above the world, but within it. The earth, the universe itself, can be seen as God’s body. No longer imagined as inert matter, a collection of objects, the Earth is seen as alive, a living community of subjects. Religious feminists stress the divine’s presence, the immanence of the sacred as opposed to divine transcendence. God is found and experienced within, within creation, within the interconnected, interdependent systems of the Earth’s body.

If God is over and above the world, dispassionate and removed, then our spirituality draws us toward that ideal. Western spirituality has devalued the body, sexuality, the earth, women. We are meant to rise above it and become like God, detached and bodiless. If God is within the world, dwelling among us as Spirit, Sophia, Shekinah then this world, this Earth, these bodies have value as expressions of and channels of the divine. All that we survey has the markings of the divine. Lakes and forests and rivers and other animals have inherent worth, not simply valued for what we can get out of them. Sea and mountains and trees are not resources, lifeless objects for our use, but kindred subjects in a vast interconnected network.

(In speaking of God-as-She, we are not simply giving God a sex change operation. This is not the Lord Yahweh in a dress. This is a whole new understanding of God, a holistic ancient/postmodern understanding of God).

Charlene Spretnak in her preface to a collection of writings from the women’s spirituality movement, says: “I believe I am in sync with most of the women’s spirituality movement in finding the symbol of a bountiful female Earthbody as the birth source of all plants and animals to be more realistic and healthy than the symbol of a distant sky-god who created each thing separate from all other things. In truth, every entity in the Earth community is literally kin, related at the molecular level… I believe the divine can be understood to be both immanent, as dynamic creativity in the specific self-organizing manifestations of the universe, and transcendent, as the mysterious complexity of the sacred whole, the entire cosmos itself.”

The Earth is not a place we need to get through on our way to heaven. This world is our true home, the place where we experience God’s abiding, indwelling presence. This world is our home, and it is meant to be savored and enjoyed. The Earth and all its creatures are to be cherished. This life is meant to be enjoyed, not merely endured. To enjoy life is to feel to the fullest, delight in our physical bodies, to find meaning in relating to others. We are cells in the body of God tingling with life and possibility and sometimes suffering and decay, but we touch and are touched, influence and are influenced, change and are changed.

I commend to you images of God that speak to God’s familiarity and personality, God’s presence and intimacy with us. I commend images of God that are connective, that help you apprehend the unity and diversity of God’s creation and your place within God’s whole Earth. Cultivate an awareness of the beauty of rocks, of sunlight, trees, wind, water. And remember how the Bible speaks of God as Rock, as Light, as Wind. The world itself is God’s body. She encompasses the world, is embodied within it. She is within us and we are within her. She is as close to us as our own breath and yet her boundaries expand to include more than us, breathing her Spirit in us and through us and connecting us with all others. It is in her that we live and move and have our being, creating with her life and love, changing and transforming and touching. There is a Deeper Power within as well as a Higher Power beyond.

She calls us back. She calls us home. She calls us back into relation with her, with each other, with ourselves—our deepest and truest selves that remember what it means to take delight in creation, to delight in the vitality of our bodies, the precious fragility of our bodies. She calls us to remember—to remember that everything is connected. Everything in this interrelated web of existence is connected. We are part of the web of life, not outside it. You and I and everything that surrounds us are all related, linked. Related as brothers and sisters and fellow living beings, linked in a web of being. And God is the weaver.

---