The Sacred Feminine

By Patricia Rice

The longing for a prayerful, personal relationship with God with many so-called feminine qualities has existed for millennia.

Caretakers of elderly men and women in severe pain often hear them call out for comfort from their dead mothers. So, in similar ways, people have called out to a God whose mothering qualities they see as loving, forgiving, understanding, wise, and ever ready to extend a helping hand and a second chance.

One way to understand the concept of the “sacred feminine” relates to those qualities in the Creator which many people associate as female. These images are less familiar than the “typical” male attributes of power, strength, fairness and force, theologians say.

Waves of public interest come and go in this way to image God, but it never completely goes away, religious historians say. In the face or repressive governments or war, the faithful’s prayers to their mental image of a comforting, loving God may be stronger, and not just among women seeking a feminine role model, but among men as well, church historians say.

For more than 40 years, some Biblical and religious history scholars have been studying underdeveloped sides of their traditions and sacred texts.

“The sacred feminine is part of that,” says University of Chicago scholar Martin E. Marty and an ordained Evangelical Lutheran Church in America minister. “More power to them. If Christians and Jews don't recover this well, they leave a vacuum for the wilder experimenters and, often, the market.”

Imaging God is all about helping people pray.

“What is important is to help people achieve a one-on-one personal relationship with God, and, if it requires them to widen their image of God, that is fine,” Sister Barbara Quinn, of the University of San Diego’s Center for Christian Spirituality. The Religious of the Sacred Heart nun’s work is to prepare Christians and an occasional Jewish student to serve as spiritual directors.

With regard to some of her Protestant students, Sister Quinn said that “Catholics have thought about God as genderless for a long time but many others do not, it’s new to them.”

Outside Christianity, Re-Imaging Pagan Goddesses

Sometimes this broadening of Judeo-Christian images of the qualities of God has been confused with the so-called movement of neo-pagans. These movements may spring from a similar human hunger for modeling so-called female qualities but should not be confused, scholars say.

Some self-described neo-pagan secular groups borrow names of mythical goddesses from the cloud-shrouded heights of Greece’s Mount Olympus or the mists of Norwegian fiords and then have invented coming- of- age rites and post-menopausal crone celebrations. Many of these groups focus on 1970s-style conscious-raising sessions to help members seek equality with men. By the mid-1970s some of neo-pagan groups, especially gathering of Wicca, witches reinventing a romantic Celtic earth religion, were organized enough to apply to the Internal Revenue Service for tax free status for their covens.

Classical scholars see a problem with creative empowerment of classical goddesses.

“People today are trying to revive worship of ancient goddesses but want to make them do different things today than the ancients ever thought of them doing,” said Barbette Stanley Spaeth, a classical studies professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. and author of the 1996 book “The Roman Goddess Ceres,”

“To say Ceres was a powerful female goddess that empowered women in a feminist sense is not true,” she said. “Ideas in the myths supported the status quo for women, in a way that those who today are interested in goddess worship may not.”

The cult of the goddess Ceres promoted chastity and motherhood and supported the patriarchal society of its time, she said.

The Oyo people, ancestors of today’s Yoruba people of Benin and southwest Nigeria, held dear their myth of a goddess or two who judged men and women in a matriarchal society. However, in general myths of goddess with public policy making powers is scant.

While Spaeth herself does not limit her image of God to male qualities, she urges others not to rewrite history and then claim it to be authentic. Fiction writers have been able to bank their pretend nostalgia for a time when goddesses might have influenced matriarchal societies.

“If they want to give their ideas of modern goddesses a wider range of possibility that’s okay – they may want to do that because it’s functionally related to their societal and psychological needs, but I don’t want them to read that back into antiquity and think that the ancients thought that way about the goddesses, ” she said.

While neo-pagans rites are often secretive, the word “goddess” has gone mainstream and commercial. It’s tossed around in fashion stores and souvenir stands as a hot, 21st century handle to make any woman, regardless of accomplishments, talents or appearance become a paying customer.

Greeting cards for grandmother enthrone her as a “goddess.” Maryland Public Television’s “Coastal Cooking” program features “cooking goddess” Andrea Farnum, a catering business owner. The April 2006 issue of “Harper’s Bazaar” describes a slinky evening gown as coming from a collection of “goddess gowns.”

Tender Images of the Divine

During the Middle Ages in Europe devotion sprung up to a tender Jesus, what was then seen as more feminine qualities than usually attributed to Christ, in a society ruled by kings proclaiming their “divine right” to rule. The rulers focused on their love of power rather than any devotion to the power of love.

In the 17th century, Francis de Sales a French Catholic priest, who saw the poverty and tax burdens of his countrymen under greedy kings talked about devotion to the love of Jesus. Many Western European church leaders were focusing on the rigid guilt-ridden severity of two similar movements: extreme puritanical Calvinism among Protestants and scrupulous Jansenism among Catholics.

In the 1670s Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque, a Visitation nun, said she saw four visions of Jesus in which he exposed his heart to emphasize his love of humanity. Some thought the image of the Son of God as the Sacred Heart of Jesus was too feminine but the message proved lasting. Prayers to Jesus in the image of His Sacred Heart spiked again during World War II and continue among many Catholics today.

Efforts to Make Prayer Accessible

In 1980s a grassroots movement for gender equality in language had church members removing words like “mankind” and “for all men” in hymnals and lectionaries and replacing them with gender inclusive words like “all people” or “humanity.” Liberal Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church in English-speaking countries followed the movement but not without long and difficult emotional debates that continue today.

As with most sweeping movements, as they gain speed, many go to extremes. One critic of gender neutral language, Helen Hitchcock, founder of a conservative Catholic group Women for Faith and Family, has monitored the issue for years. She said a low water mark came in the mid-1990s when in its passion for inclusive language Oxford University Press published its “New Testament and Psalms” rewording Jesus’ own language in the prayer he taught his followers. Oxford suggested: "Our Father-Mother in heaven."

Brakes were put on gender-neutral language in several denominations, especially as a few feminist theologians eventually left Christianity to describe themselves as neo-pagans.

In the 1970s, the words rape, sexual abuse and domestic violence were just beginning to appear in newspapers and magazines, and a few shelters for survivors of domestic violence were opening. As Christian and Jewish congregational leaders and spiritual directors worked with abused women and abused men, many sought images of God that were not a barrier to those survivors’ prayers.

Now, more pastors and spiritual directors are trained to be sensitive in helping to widen the person’s image of God so they can pray better.

“We need to include many ways we image God,” said Sister Quinn. At the University of San Diego’s Center for Christian Spirituality, “We prepare spiritual directors to be as broad about however God comes to a person, in the variety of ways that God can,” she said.

“I think bottom line is that God is mystery, But that does not mean God is inaccessible but that he is inexhaustible. So our human task is always to stay wide open to how God comes to us,” Quinn said.