In which an angry encounter leads to a few thoughts on metaphors and motherhood

Could my experiences as a woman and a mother be included in how we speak or think about God?

Hi friends,

I’ve been circling around something that happened earlier this year and I finally want to take a run at it with you today. I kept putting this one off, week after week, because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to approach it, so fair warning that today’s note might feel a bit disjointed…which seems a pretty fair reflection with how I have been feeling about this particular thing though so we’ll just go with it.¹

Here’s the inciting incident: A few weeks ago, at a book-related event, I was confronted by a very angry person.² Apparently, there is no end to the things I say or preach, write or embody that infuriate people. That kind of comes with the territory of being a woman with an opinion on Beyoncé’s internet. I’m pretty used to people being angry with me about this or that, or warning people that I’m “dangerous” or a “false teacher” or what-not. It doesn’t register in my own soul too much anymore.³

But this one has stuck with me a bit.

In the context of a talk, I did what I always do: I used a variety of language for speaking of God. It wasn’t the point of what I was saying, just part of it. I used a variety of pronouns (I often use they/them pronouns for God in particular⁴) and metaphors, including referring to God as a good mother, multiple times. And when I prayed, I concluded the way that I usually do: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, one God and Mother of us all.”

Well. Someone did not like this.

And they found me afterwards to seemingly “call me out” about it. It wasn’t a huge scene but it was enough of a scene to leave me a bit flustered. Enneagram 9s, you know. I ended up closing the conversation after a while because I could see that the person wasn’t engaging in good faith: they had their Bible app open and were strongly communicating every instance of God being called “Father” or “he.” They wanted to correct me in my language for and about God. I felt a bit attacked and cornered, talked over and accused. It wasn’t awesome.

Finally I had to hold my hand up and tell them that I wasn’t interested in a Proof Text Battle and it was clear they weren’t curious, only angry. If they truly wanted to explore metaphors and language for God, I was sure there were ways to do that other than this and that I wished them well on that journey, should they wish to engage in it. I said that it was possible that their anger was an invitation from the Spirit to curiosity, not confrontation, and to stay open to that. And that didn’t land well so even as I left the venue, I could see them gesturing emphatically with a small group of friends, Bible app still open.

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I shrugged it off with the organizers because it truly didn’t disrupt me in a meaningful way, it’s just a thing that happens sometimes. Onwards, etc.

But in the weeks since, I’ve found myself circling the encounter in my quieter moments. I’ve rehearsed what I should have said. I’ve gone proof-texting in my own Bible app even though I know better. I’ve accumulated arguments. I’ve felt sad and even ashamed that I didn’t defend my position better. I have felt angry at the person who picked the fight at an event, I’ve felt sad for them. I’ve remembered my own seasons of certainty with some embarrassment when I would have done the exact same thing to someone. I’ve definitely gone back and forth about what I could have done better - what would [insert aspirational spiritual leader here] have done? whatever it is, it would be better than whatever I flustered through.

So when I first began writing this note to you, months ago, it was defensive. It was a whole treatise on using mothering language or inclusive language for God. I approached it like it was a seminary paper⁵ I have receipts! here are good teachers on this topic! here is a syllabus-worth of reading!

I pulled out God as midwife in Ezekiel 16. I went to Catholic theologians and mystics writing about how important it is to use all pronouns for God. I turned to spiritual writers whose books are on my shelves, complete with dog-eared pages and underlined passages with deep research into language and metaphor and inclusion. I proof-texted like a first year Bible college student, pulling out references in Isaiah to God as a labouring woman or Jesus’ language of being a “mother hen” who gathers her chicks under her wings.

And the Spirit! Oh, I wrote whole paragraphs about the language for the Spirit like “ruach” - that Hebrew Bible noun for the creative force of God, the breath of God is distinctly feminine.

I wrote about how the oldest versions of what we now call our Bible like the Syriac and Greek writings used a lot of maternal and feminine language that was eventually wiped away by translators. I wanted to tell you about how in the Old Syriac Gospels daring to the 4th and 5th centuries share a version of John 14:26 that show Jesus using the pronoun “she” in reference to the Spirit: as in, “She will teach you everything.”

I went looking for all the ancient and traditional religious art that represented the feminine and the maternal in God. Basically, I exhausted myself before I realized that wasn’t actually the invitation, not really, not this time.⁶

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More than fifteen years ago, The Shack was in the early days of its rise to selling 20 million copies. It had ignited massive conversations because - spoiler alert? - the character of God-the-Father in the book is represented as a Black woman. It was electrifying and controversial for many readers but healing for so many others at the time, myself included. All conversations have to start somewhere and surprisingly The Shack started something.

Right around then, I was six months pregnant with my second child when I met up with some girlfriends in Seattle for a little sleepover and visit around that time. We had a wonderful time walking the markets and catching up. That evening, we laid around the hotel room in our jammies talking and of course, we ended up talking about the book because we had all read it and we discussed this particular aspect: God as Mother. One of my friends expressed a lot of discomfort with it, using many of the same arguments or protestations we’ve all heard about that notion but from a place of sincerity and gentleness.

At that time, I certainly didn’t use anything other than masculine language for God. It was all I knew. God the Father. He/him. Period. But the conversations the book sparked was igniting something expansive in me. I was curious about this notion of how we speak about God, intrigued even.

Who gets to “represent” God? What language do we more readily accept and why?

And why were people much more comfortable with the lily-white statues of a European silky-haired Jesus than a Black woman as God the Creator in a work of fiction?⁷ And couldn’t my experiences as a woman and a mother be included in how we speak or think about God?

Perhaps my fascination with this was because I was right in the white-hot centre of my own new experiences with motherhood. I was six months pregnant. I had just finished nursing my firstborn. I was covered in stretch marks and wearing nursing bras, sleepless and having my heart rewritten by this experience. My life had profoundly changed.

Mothering was giving me a whole new altar for encountering God, in ways I wasn’t expecting or demanding or knew how to express. Looking back now, I can see this season of my life for the turning point that it was for me. But at the time, I was just right in the middle of it.

After my friend shared her trepidation with the notion of feminine language for God, we all shared a few of our own thoughts like that. But I wrapped mine up by saying, “Well, it’s not like God has a penis, girls.”

There was a pause as this registered and then we all fell out laughing.⁸ I mean, of course God doesn’t have a penis. But saying it out loud cracked us up.

But it stayed with me. God doesn’t have a penis. So why do we act like God is a boy in our language or metaphors?⁹

I look back on that weekend as the starting point of something in my own imagination about God. All of a sudden, I began to notice all the language in Scripture about God being so much bigger, more expansive, than my own narrow language or the language of my religious institutions, let alone the English language. And I began to relate to God in mothering language as rooted in Scripture.

I began to wonder if perhaps I had been missing whole aspects of God simply because I stayed too long in too-small of a language-box for the goodness, welcome, and expansiveness of the Ancient One.

Granted, it took a few more years for me to experience this for myself.