This is a short theological excursus which is relevant to my current research project, written as a commentary on one of yesterday’s news items. Always eager for a new slant on stories about the Church, preferably those which have a Frankie Howerd “oooh, you are naughty” spin on them, the media have seized on a suggestion that the Church of England might adopt gender-neutral pronouns for God.
As many have pointed out, the masculine language of worship and theology has failed to reflect the richer range of imagery and metaphors we find in scripture. Consider for example these two consecutive verses in Isaiah 42: 13-14:
Yahweh advances like a hero, his fury is stirred like a warrior’s. He gives the war shout, raises the hue and cry, marches valiantly against his foes.
“From the beginning I have been silent, I have kept quiet, held myself in check. I groan like a woman in labour, I suffocate, I stifle.”
The prophet describes God in the third person as “he”, and the verse is redolent with testosterone-charged masculine imagery. But in the next verse, God speaks in the first person as a woman in childbirth, silenced and suffocating. I sometimes wonder if the whole of Christian history rests in the contrast between those two verses—the male interpreter who projects his own concepts of a violent warrior God onto revelation, and the voice of the maternal, birthing God struggling to be heard amidst the hue and cry of literal and metaphorical religious warfare.
These contrasting images invite a fluid, playful, and poetic approach to theological language. God is always in the gaps where polar opposites resist embrace, hiding out of conceptual reach within paradoxical couplings (word/flesh, virgin/mother, human/divine, male/female.)
I wonder what would happen if we resisted the temptation to objectify God implied in the search for appropriate pronouns, because all pronouns are in some sense objectifying. They indicate that the person being spoken about is not a “thou” but a point of reference, a topic of discussion, an object. What would happen if theologians only ever addressed God as “you”, following the example of many of the psalms and many medieval women mystics (more appropriately referred to as vernacular theologians)? All theology would then become a dialogue with God, and not a debate about God.
In her Letters from Westerbork camp before her deportation to Auschwitz, Etty Hillesum writes, “My life has become an uninterrupted dialogue with You, oh God, one great dialogue.” Could theology be written as a dialogue—as prayer—in a way that would avoid altogether the anxiety over pronouns? Might this be a mode in which a theological écriture féminine could be written? I think I’ll try.
This leads me to wonder if the multiplication of conflicted and contested categories of gendered identity and belonging (every gender seems to have become an individual in search of a community!), is a cry from the heart of a culture that no longer has communities, a culture that has lost its capacity to ask “Who art thou?” Must everybody now be an objectified third—a he or a she or a they—and never a thou? Maybe, as in the legend of the Holy Grail, we are no longer able to gaze into the face of the wounded one and ask, “What are you suffering?” As is so often the case in my musings, this brings me back to Simone Weil:
The fullness of love for neighbor is simply the capacity to ask the question, “What is your agony?” It is to know (recognize) that the afflicted exist, not as a unit in a collection nor as an example of a social category labeled “the afflicted,” but in all their humanity, exactly like us, who have been stamped and marked by an inimitable mark, by their affliction. For this reason, it is sufficient but also indispensable to know how to look upon them in a certain way.
This look is first of all an attentive look, when the soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being that it is looking at, just as it is, in all its truth. It is only capable of this if it is capable of attention. (p. 28)
Have we stopped paying attention? Is that the root of all our linguistic writhings and wrangles? In our culture of increasingly atomised and fragmented individualism, do we no longer know how to look upon our neighbour, to ask, “What is your agony?” And so a great attention-seeking cry goes up from our midst: “I am the victim. I am the one who suffers more than any others.”
As Nina Power reminds us, suffering is intrinsic to the human condition, but victimhood is destructive of our capacity to recognise and respond to the suffering other:
Victimhood today has paradoxically become a very powerful tool, and a potentially vicious one. It is far, far harder but absolutely necessary to begin not with the desire to rank victims, but rather with the understanding that everyone suffers, and to try to work out how best to minimize that suffering for everybody, which requires careful, and adult, negotiation. (pp. 16-17)
At the heart of the Christian faith is the vulnerable, suffering God. To encounter this God, we only need to know how to ask, “What is your agony?” to the one who comes in all the forms that God Incarnate takes—the fatherless newborn, the refugee child, the manual labourer, the homeless wanderer, the tortured victim, the one betrayed, the crucified. In these, God is always “you”,
for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire)
Maybe the churches need to abandon all their talking about God, and to allow their liturgical lives to become one great dialogue with God, spilling over and suffusing all our relationships with that love which sees others not as objectified third persons but as “you,” and has the courageous attentiveness to ask, “What is your agony?”
Food for thought. Ideas to develop. And thanks to The Daily Mail for the headline that inspired the reflection.
Thanks for reading this post. Please subscribe if you want to follow future posts, most of which will be available only to subscribers. Subscriptions are free and all are welcome.
I recently read - and of course have lost track of where - that the proper pronoun for God is God. For most of a decade now, I have consciously and conscientiously, used only feminine pronouns for God and typically refer to God in my prayers as Lady Wisdom. I figure after millennia of imbalance towards the masculine, my personal imbalance towards the feminine is forgivable. However, in my morning meditation time today, the thought came to me that the Divine Masculine is in dire need of rescue from millennia of patriarchal overlay. This morning I am grateful that the Divine Feminine was ignored in my religious upbringing. It is far easier for me to feel my unique and deeply personal relationship to God when I use the feminine imagery, because the masculine imagery is so completely highjacked by early images and teachings. How, I wonder, might the Divine Masculine enrich my relationship with God? What would the Divine Masculine even be? Different from the Divine Feminine? And so my mind begins to weave through multiple associations. Thank you, Tina.
There is a profundity of exploration here.
So, may I make a superficial point. In the Anglophone world 'thou' has completely inverted it's meaning. From a word of intimacy it is now a word that is only used for God - and not, in my experience, of meaning 'even closer than my parents and family'. When one prays in French 'tu' places God close - not a stranger but an intimate.
We may need to explore a range of other (exotic?) languages to get anywhere near words we can use of, and to, god to take us anywhere near the effect the gospel writers were trying to unlock.
Paul Flaherty