Actually an Artist

Daily writing prompt

What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?

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It was really tricky narrowing this response down to just ONE, but I think I’d have to go with using masculine language for God. I grew up in the 90s, so we all did it. “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” My childhood image of God was of an old (white) Dude in the clouds. Loving, present, but limited by my own exposure and imagination. In college, I was introduced to a broader array of pronouns for God, and for awhile I liked it OK but “[wanted] to preserve the poetry of the original language” when singing hymns, in particular. I hung on to that for a long time, I think.

Along the way, I had to confront my limited biblical scholarship as well as the biased biblical scholarship handed down to ALL OF US. I’m specifically aware of and thinking about the ways Wisdom is personified and feminized, and also how the Holy Spirit was specifically referred to in the feminine in ancient Hebrew. I am no scholar of this, however, so I share this as someone whose own thinking evolved in considering this, not as someone who can point out the things precisely. Sorry.

I’ve always considered myself a feminist, but I have to say that growing older and growing up, and having kids of my own has made me more radical than ever. Learning just how little I knew about Black, Latino, Womanist and Indigenous theology humbled me and set me on paths to learn and do better with a wider array of influences. My image of God is no longer that old white Dude in the Clouds. I don’t have a clear one. This art is called Mother Hen, an image Jesus uses to describe how he wishes he could relate to Jerusalem. I just love this artwork.

Now, when I sing a song like Shepherd Me, O God, I switch up the pronouns for God: He, She, They are all ways of widening the image we have of God. God cannot be contained by any one single image. They are everywhere, in everything, in everyone. Our beautiful diversity is Divinely inspired, and it’s long past due for me to admit that hanging on to only one way of describing God limited my imagination even when I didn’t want to.