#9: Radical Equality, and then the surprise...

It has been some 30 years or more since I realized that God is not male.  Many, I know, came to that momentous realization long before I did, and some have still not arrived there.  For me, though, it has been a long and difficult slog through masculine pronouns and power-centric adjectives for God.  Back in the early days, even God's people were presumably all male. 

In some cases I can look back with humor, for example, the Christmas carol sing in which I and a friend strove to neutralize all the pronouns.  "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentle Friends" seemed pretty radical at the time!  Or more recently, the dear parishioner who willingly joined me in using the feminine pronoun, "She" for the Holy Spirit.

There have been other times, though, less clearly etched in memory, in which participating in a tradition in which women were so consistently pushed to the margins has been quite painful. I remember reading Margaret Starbird's book, "The Woman with the Alabaster Jar," and longing deeply for a way to more consciously and deliberately incorporate the feminine into Christian theology and worship.

One of the deep joys of the Lindisfarne Community has been the conscious, deliberate attention given to issues of feminist language and biblical hermeneutic.  Our abbess blogs regularly on the missing women in biblical stories, and frequently invokes Phyllis Trible's mandate to wrestle with the text until we find its blessing for us. In this community, I can use the language that feels most natural to me -- for a God who is complete Presence, and for a people of God who, in the words of Understanding #9, have received "an equal dignity, an equal calling, an equal responsibility and an equal blessing," regardless of gender, sexual orientation, age, race, or class. It is a gift.

And then comes the surprise...  This form of feminism is not all about claiming superiority over all those sexist men, or even equality with the best of them.  It is also about hearing a call to "radical subordination," a willingness to be co-equal, yet allowing the Other complete freedom. We are called to release all forms of prejudice and discrimination, preferring the Other to ourselves.  How wonderful, and challenging!

And above all, how interesting to find these ideas bound in a single paragraph.  To call upon God as all of Who God is, and to honor each other as All of Who We Are.  This is so much more than simply a feminist voice in the church, it is fundamentally about a kind of wholeness for both Human and Divine persons. Each and all are called to be whole and complete, and to do so we must also be in community.

Blessings of wholeness, Father-Mother, Christ, and Spirit, be with us all.  Amen.