How to Talk to Children About Mother God (and Why Using Feminine Pronouns and Metaphors for the Divine Matters So Much)

“Feminine Divine” by Annelie Solis

by Daneen Akers

(This is an excerpt from the full PDF available below)

My older daughter, 11, is teaching my younger daughter, 4, how to pray. 

“You start, ‘Dear Mother God,’” she says.

Her little sister closes her eyes, and repeats this phrase, only in her four-year-old voice, it sounds like:

“Dear Mudder Dod.” 

I smile and close my eyes along with the two of them. Not only is this adorable, but it’s also a life-giving vision of a Divine that fully encompasses the feminine, and that vision is going to sustain them and help them be part of changing our world for the better. 

I would be doing this if I were a mother to boys also because it’s just as important for our boys to grow up with a foundational vision of the Divine as fully gender-inclusive. This is a key way to help shield them from toxic masculinity, which denies boys and men access to their full and best selves.

I was in my 30s before I first heard God referred to as “She” in a church service. It was actually during a song. Just one verse had been revised to include feminine pronouns. But that was enough. Singing those familiar words to She broke open a dam inside of me. I began to weep in my seat. I didn’t realize how much I had felt excluded as a woman from the concept that we are all “created in the image of God” until that moment amid my tears. 

Sure, I’d been around many people who talked about how every person was part of the Imago Dei, but every song, every prayer, every work of art, every metaphor for God that any leader ever used in my presence as a child and young adult was decidedly and intentionally male. As a child, I assumed god was male because that was the stronger, better option.

That pervasive, patriarchal idea of God equals male, which then has turned into male equals God has damaged us all at every level from personal to societal, and it needs to change.

As womanist scholar and divinity school professor, Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney says, “As long as a masculine God remains at the top of the pyramid, nothing else we do matters.”

And simply moving to a gender-neutral title, such as “God,” is a start, but it’s not enough, even if we believe any transcendent Divine is beyond our concepts of gender.

 In Dance of the Dissident Daughter, author Sue Monk Kidd’s spiritual memoir of waking up to the pervasive patriarchy in our culture and in her Southern Baptist faith, she makes a compelling argument about why we need an explicitly feminine form for the formless. 

She asks herself “what’s the bother?” if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless. 

“The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It’s the language the soul understands.

And yet—and here was the crux—the images that have pervaded our speech, thought, and feeling about the Divine have told us the Divine is exclusively male…Indeed, the image, language, and metaphor about God as male has been used so exclusively, for so long (about five thousand years) that most people seem to believe God really is male.”

Monk Kidd argues that we must “recover” a Divine Feminine that thousands of years of patriarchy has tried to repress. 

The good news is that it is actually quite easy to start making changes to recover a Divine Feminine at home.

………….

Here’s the full essay in PDF form (you don’t have to share your email or anything—it’s just in pdf form for better formatting—just click to access). The full essay includes:

 - More about why we need a feminine form for a formless Divine (and why just using a gender neutral title isn’t enough).

- Wisdom and scholarship regarding God as She from Sue Monk Kidd, Glennon Doyle, Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, Dr. Christena Cleveland, and other holy troublemakers who have incredible insights.

- Ways to start recovering the Divine Feminine in our homes.

- Praying with your children to Mother (even in front of others)

- Embracing feeling awkward for a season (it’s not easy to undo approximately five thousand years of religious patriarchy!)

- Some favorite artwork of the Divine in Feminine form (including one amazing tattoo of Mother)

- Mother Mystery, a prayer by Kaitlin Curtice

I pray that God and Her wisdom will hold you and your young holy troublemakers.