“Everyone knows that God’s beyond gender. Why does it matter
what pronoun you use?”
I’ve always had a hard time with boy-god language. It was a
huge thing for me in trying to come back to church after my adolescent time
away, and I worked hard to uncondition myself from initial my gut-punch
reaction to hearing God referred to as “he.”
I read all the feminist theology I could get my hands on in college and I
wrote my master’s thesis on deconstruction, language, and religious experience. A version of it was published in a journal 8
people read.
Bottom line: “Yes, it matters.”
Maybe it’s just me. Of
course, it could just be me, uniquely tossed about on my own
personal-is-political winds of fortune.
In many Episcopal churches it’s general practice to use less masculine
language when it’s convenient, like “It’s right to give our thanks and praise” instead of “It is right to give him thanks and praise” when we lift up
our hearts at the prayers for Communion. And certainly in many pockets of the church
inclusive language is a priority.
But our defaults are still male. Crushingly, my own children refer to God as
“he” and I am powerless to stop it. Mean streets and what not. My son (7) insists that this is just another
thing that I, as his mother, Just. Do. Not. Get.
Again: “everyone knows” God’s not male, so who cares?
Scrupulous as I am about un-gendering my own language for
God, I’ve had relatively little practice with differently-gendering my language for God. In my commitment to God being beyond the male
gender, I’ve insisted along the way also that God is also beyond the female
gender and left it at that. Christian theology is scattered with images of
Jesus feeding us with his bloody breast as mothers feed their babies
(particularly in the medieval period, but long before then, too). As someone who had a hard time with the
stereotyped images of mothering (another piece of writing for another day) I
instead have always talked generally about God as a parent, not a mother or father.
At some point a few years ago when I prayed the Jesus prayer (kind of a
Christian mantra—you repeat it to yourself again and again, either in formal
prayer or in the course of doing other things—sometimes “Jesus, Son of the
Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner” and sometimes “have mercy on us”) I
began saying “Amma, Christ, have mercy on us.” Amma is, more or less, the
feminine parallel to the Aramaic Abba (which means “dad,” as Jesus referred to
God). In the habitrail of my mind, it
was a nice shift. But it was just me.
Until this Lent.
I don’t know how it came about, but this year in assembling the
prayers of the people for my parish for Lent, I put in the phrase I’ve prayed
with under my breath for several years. Amma,
Christ, have mercy on us. This is the
part of the service where we name concerns for the church and the world, prisoners
and captives, friends and members of the congregation who are ill,
anniversaries and birthdays and conflict and violence and freedom. The usual
response is “Lord have mercy,” but instead the reader ends each petition “Amma,
Christ” and the congregation responds “Have mercy on us.”
And, have mercy. It knocked my socks off. You
might note that this is posted before the second Sunday of Lent so we’ve only
done it once, but I was so surprised at how different the rest of the service
felt because of it. I am not totally
thrilled with how the prayers are written—it’s really, really wordy and
long—but hearing “Amma Christ” said by everyone else, not just the echo chamber
in my head was, ten years into saying all kinds of masculine prayers, a
revelation.
The thing that surprised me, though, wasn’t that it was nice
to have my own theological preferences reflected in the worship. Certainly that is very pleasant.
The real shift for me wasn’t in how it felt to say “Amma
Christ” with my parish.
The real shift was what it felt like to say God the Father.
I am a good logicker—I can justify a lot in my head if I
think about it for long enough. So often I just mentally “type over” male God
language when I have to use it. I mean, yes, empirically, Jesus was male so I
can’t not say “Son of God.” The Trinity, too, is kind of a big deal, and
yes, I do baptisms in the name of the “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” But in my
mind, there’s always a little prickle of discomfort. Talking about Jesus as
mother actually freed me to say God as Father without holding my breath. And I had not expected that.
It turns out that, yes, while “everyone knows” God is beyond
gender, there is still something about how using the whole range of gender expression
makes it easier to hear both the middle and the edges. It doesn’t work just to mentally erase the
male stuff (even while still saying it out loud) and not add in an
alternative.
I have a degree in gender studies. I know all of this is an
accident of culture. (though my son will
be glad to explain to you how pink is empirically
a girl color and the fact that it was his
favorite color from ages 3-5 does not change that)
Apparently, though, however post post post whatever I want
to be, I’m still stuck in the binary.
Apparently the words we use do matter.
Apparently it helps to use all of them.
