About once a year I do a Question Box service, when in lieu of the sermon I answer as many questions as I can from among those people have written down earlier in the service. It being impossible to get to all of them in the space of 20 minutes, I promised this year to take them up gradually in such forums as newsletter columns and blogs. This one is in reference to the benediction our choir sings most weeks,
May the road rise to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
May the rain fall soft upon your fields
And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his/her hand. (The choir alternates, one week singing “her,” the next singing “his.”)
The questioner asked: “Does God have a gender?” Here’s my response, which I also published in the forthcoming edition of our newsletter.
I love this question! In fact, I’ve given this a lot of thought for years. In a Feminist Theology class at Syracuse, we read pieces arguing that in imagining God as male, men—who had shaped most of Jewish and Christian tradition—were creating God in their own image and then worshiping themselves. In other words, committing idolatry.
I agreed with these theo/alogians (if God might be female, then the area of study might better be called thealogy) but thought they needed to go further. I didn’t believe in an anthropomorphic god at all (as you’ll hear in today’s sermon), and I wrote a paper called something like “Anthropomorphism and Idolatry” arguing that describing the divine exclusively in human images was as idolatrous as describing it exclusively in male images. After all, if God created everything, surely it would be a wild coincidence for us to be the one and only creature who resembles the Creator. It’s self-serving and arrogant to assume that’s true.
So, no, God does not have a gender. As feminist theology points out, does God have genitals? Chromosomes? A beard? Of course the answer must be no. It’s a metaphor, and when we start to take it literally, we end up worshiping maleness, and we’ve seen where that leads: misogyny.
And no, God is not a human being. As I pointed out in my long-ago essay, does God have blood? a brain? two arms, two legs? Of course the answer must be no. When we take this metaphor literally, we end up worshiping humanness, and that leads to our despising the rest of nature and destroying the environment.
This doesn’t mean that these images should be tossed aside. The fact is, we humans think in images and metaphors, especially when it comes to great abstractions such as love, peace, and God. Whatever the holy is—power, goodness, creativity—it is beyond simple understanding and beyond anything to which it might be likened. And yet, metaphors help us express what we mean. When people imagine the holy as something that creates life, they may imagine a sculptor working in clay (as in one of the Genesis stories, and many other religions’ creation stories) or a woman giving birth (as in Babylonian religion and others). Neither makes sense literally, but they’re good metaphors for the power of creation. When the choir sings, “May God hold you in the palm of her [or his] hand,” what they are saying doesn’t make sense literally, but it is a good metaphor for this wish: as you move through a life that is often hazardous, we hope that some of the great forces of the universe will carry you safely through.
Because I think metaphors are a necessary aspect of human thought (if I wasn’t convinced already, one of George Lakoff’s early books, Metaphors We Live By, with Mark Johnson,sealed it), I think the remedy to their limitations is not to shun them but to use a wide variety of them. This helps prevent us from taking any of them literally, or limiting our understanding to just a couple of characteristics of, in this case, God, or as I prefer to say, the holy. Maybe the holy is like water; this is a frequent image for the Tao, flexible and ever-changing and powerful. And/or, maybe it’s like a crucible, in which the unimportant aspects of our lives are burned away. And/or, maybe it’s like a healer, curing the illnesses of the soul, the body, even the planet. And/or, maybe it’s like a flower, growing where we tend it and needing our care to flourish. If we have enough of these different metaphors in the mix, then we can safely throw in some human ones too: male, female, and neither.
What metaphors express what you believe is holy?
Blessings,
Amy
Sermons in Stones 
5 comments
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May 2, 2014 at 1:36 pm
Kip
I can see that.
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May 2, 2014 at 1:48 pm
tatwood2005
What an incredibly wise essay, Amy. May I quite it to others? But of course! Glad you like it. –Amy
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May 9, 2014 at 12:34 pm
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[…] Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern answers the question, “Does God have a gender?” with an exploration of the role of […]
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May 10, 2014 at 5:45 am
cbclarenbach
There is a group at Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary who routinely call the Divine Isness, “The Divine: Male, Female, Both, and Neither.” The metaphorical (and costume!) richness of this approach has been fruitful.
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May 11, 2014 at 5:53 pm
Roger Schriner AKA Chris Schriner
Thanks for these thoughtful comments. Here are some related ideas from Bridging the God Gap:
It is intriguing that in 2006, one-third of Americans still said God is male. Only one percent said God is female, and thirty-seven per-cent said “neither.” Since “neither” was an option, we may ask why so many chose “male” instead. Did they actually think that the Ultimate has male features? Big biceps? Facial hair? A deep voice? Etc?
Sometimes the answer is yes. According to a Harris Poll, about 10% of Americans say that God appears “like a human with a face, body, arms, legs, eyes.” But since a lot more than 10% say God is male, many people must think of God as a man but deny that God has a human body. Thus there is an inner contradiction in their concept of deity. Part of a person’s mind can think of deity as a male human, while another part understands this as an analogy rather than a literal statement of fact
A person could deny that God has a male body while maintaining that God’s mind or personality is male, but this claim falls apart if we consider it closely. Much of “male” consciousness is due to having male anatomy, just as female consciousness is partially shaped by dealing with the possibility of pregnancy. In addition, many aspects of maleness are socially constructed, but this would not be true of a supreme being. God wasn’t raised by doting parents who handed “him” a blue blanket and little fire trucks, while giving pink dollies to his celestial sister. Once we subtract out all of these factors, does even a trace of masculinity remain?
BTW, Amy, I like your idea of using many metaphors. As the Rev. Roy Phillips commented, anybody who has only one image of the holy is committing idolatry.
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