God’s Feminine Side Is Plain to See

Any halfway decent theologian will tell you that God is decidedly not an old man on a throne in the sky. That this image of God persists somehow in the popular imagination, most likely has to do with some language we find in the Bible and the layers and layers of patriarchy involved in the whole shebang. It takes some effort and imagination to dislodge this monolithic HE, but if you are willing to dig around a little or look at things from a different angle in the text, you can find many glimpses of a God not defined by patriarchy–a god that is larger (or perhaps smaller), or just altogether different from the Almighty Father. 

The writers of the Bible are well aware of the insufficiency of the words available to them to speak of the divine him/her/it, because they reach so wildly. God is a lily, a rose, dew, wind and fire. God is a mother bear and a lion. On the other hand God is not a lion, but a lamb. God is not in the fire or the wind, but in the still small voice. God is in the images of birthing and bird–these are especially fruitful. 

God comes to Job in a whirlwind and asks, “Where were you…when the sea burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment, the dense clouds its wrap? …From whose belly does ice come; who gave birth to heaven’s frost?” Obviously not Job’s belly. Where was Job when God pushed and groaned–in the waiting room smoking a cigar?

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