Thursday, August 23, 2012

God All Encompassing

I was considering today God.  That, on its own, does not sound too particularly exciting because at one point or another all of us take a moment to reflect on the nature of the Divine during some point of the day (even if that 'reflection' is no more than turning around to yell at the g@% d@#* cat you just tripped on).

I suppose I was envisioning heaven, or really anticipating the presence of God when I realized that all of my imaginings had a male God. In some of my thoughts, God was even a very old white man with a salt and pepper beard.

Don't take me the wrong way- I have no problem with anybody daydreaming about God or heaven or the stupid cat.  What intrigues me is that in my mind I still had not consciously made the full transition to conceiving of God in genderlessness.

I know  a few of my friends (and even a few of my readers) dislike seeing God in any gender but male.  I personally prefer to, theologically speaking, consider the Divine to be exempt from, yet encompassing all genders.  Even though I feel this way, I have resisted for many years of taking into practice invoking God in the feminine because I did not see the worth.

My daydream didn't have a matriarch, but a patriarch. 

Perhaps I have already covered this ground once in the preceding paragraphs, but this set off a red flag when I realized this.  The alert didn't occur because I could conceive of God the Father, but as I tried to do the same for God the Mother...

Well.  I couldn't.  When I tried to envision God the Divine... Well.  I couldn't.

Startling myself with all of this, I decided today that it IS time to incorporate gender envisioning into my spiritual exercises ... to consider AND practice that perhaps God can transcend gender yet be encompassing of all genders.  

Maybe I'm over-reacting.  Maybe I've just been in a darned liberal arts college for too long (two days back in that yankee-land!).  However, I think that now is the time to consider a God who is generous... who is "omni-"... who is able to be my patriarch and matriarch.

No comments:

Post a Comment