DDD encore

The question then occurred to me: Well, if that’s so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what’s the big deal? Why all this bother?
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. They have told us there is only one form and that form is masculine. Indeed, the image, language, and metaphor of 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.

My friend and mentor Dr. Beatrice Bruteau once described it to me like this: The Absolute Reality, the I Am, can be likened to a dancer. And the forms that the absolute takes can be likened to the dances. The Absolute, she said, dances many dances, in a variety of movements that are constantly giving way into others. When we see the dance, the dancer takes on expression, shape, immediacy, presence, and meaning for us. We can observe the relationship of the dance to the dancer, and we understand that the choreography is infinite. We cannot look at just one movement or one dance and say, that is the dancer.

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As I pondered other reasons for recovering female images of the Divine, I remembered the biblical claim that humans were made in the image of God. Now since human meant both male and female, didn’t that mean both male and female should be used when referring to the Divine? It seemed so logical, so simple, so obvious, that it made one wonder, as McFague put it, “what all the fuss is about.”
She suggests that the fuss is because Western theology has been infected by a fear of female sexuality. She points out that while sexuality is cloaked in the male metaphor for God, it seems blatent in a female metaphor. We are so familiar with male metaphors and their sexuality has been so masked that when female metaphors appear, they seem overtly sexual by comparison. They register in us as taboo.