Daring to Call God Mother
A resent guest post from Shannon Evans
In honor of Mother’s Day week, I wanted to resend an essay we shared a few years back. I’m ripping down the paywall because I find great beauty in the words and want them spread far and wide. If you want to read more fantastic guest letters, please prayerfully consider upgrading to a full subscription.
It’s my joy to host some of my favorite Catholic writers in this space. Please enjoy today’s piece from
. The Catechism states that "In no way is God in man's image. He is neither man nor woman. God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes." I loved reading this piece from Shannon—I had no idea that we’ve had a pope who said God was a mother! I look forward to your feedback below. Would you ever call God mother? Do you ever meditate on God’s feminine traits?My parents, God bless their earnest souls, held weekly family devotional times in our living room when I was little. On one particular evening when I was in preschool, my sister and I began discussing the gender of God: a “boy,” of course. My father kindly tried to explain that God is neither boy nor girl, but Spirit. Four-year-old me wasn’t buying it. Amused by my certainty that God was a boy, my dad asked, “Well, Shan, how do you know?” Without missing a beat, I retorted, “Because! Have you ever heard of a girl named God?”
My dad has enjoyed telling that story my whole life, which is probably the only reason I still remember it. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that I let myself get in touch with the grief the incident represented to me. As just a little bitty kid I had already internalized that God was exclusively masculine and exclusively male, two things I would never be. And in doing so, what I unconsciously understood was that boys shared something with God that I never would. Did that make them closer to God? Did that mean God liked them better? All the girls I knew liked girls better; the boys all liked boys better. This is a natural and common way for children to organize their world; a developmentally appropriate stage.
As I aged I learned to laugh off such notions of God playing favorites with the boys, but the roots went deeper than I was willing to acknowledge. The next few decades of my life were spent almost entirely in Christian circles, where I continued to only hear and see God represented in masculine language and imagery. It’s not something Christianity does consciously, it’s just deeply ingrained in the way we relate to God. When pressed, we concede that God is not male, but Spirit. And yet by and large we continue to use exclusively masculine words and pictures for God. Any attempt to employ a feminine representation of God is treated with fear, skepticism, or even cries of heresy.
It’s true that Scripture speaks of God in primarily masculine language, although there are more exceptions to that than we might realize. Protestant denominations in particular tend to be wary of moving beyond the bounds of Scripture. But Catholics value the changing input of Tradition through scholars, saints, and mystics over the centuries. The fact is, we should all be able to recognize that the limitations of a more primitive, patriarchal society don’t need to put a ceiling on the way we are allowed to imagine the Divine today. My guess is that if pressed, not many of us would embrace the idea of our God commanding wars or smiting sinners anymore, both things that are represented in our Biblical canon.
I never personally gave much thought to the concept of God as Mother until a few years ago when I had a rather traumatic experience of being made powerless in a religious space, in part because of my gender. It was a turning point for me. In the days and weeks that followed I was awakened to my own longing for a mothering God, one who could speak to me in ways that most profoundly touch my womanly soul.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a wonderful father who has modeled God’s heart for me all my life. But there is something about coming to a female, or being protected by a female, that feels deeply safe, receptive, and unconditional. I think this is part of the reason many of us take such comfort in our relationship with Mary. Mary of Nazareth was not God, but as Queen of Heaven and through her many apparitions she gives us a glimpse of what a mothering God might look and feel like, and I think it brings her great joy to do that. In fact, I have good reason to credit my own awakening to her intercession.
There are other saints I have asked for help from on this journey, too. Reading the frequent feminine and maternal language in Julian of Norwich’s book Revelations of Divine Love gave me the confidence to proclaim the motherhood of God publicly after I had come to know it for myself privately. I was delighted to come across a quote from Pope John Paul I saying that as much as God is our father, “even more” God is our mother. One of my favorite saints-to-be, Sister Thea Bowman, called God both mother and sister.
God is Mystery and Spirit. We will never run out of new metaphors for describing the Holy and trying to grasp it in our limited capacity, but that doesn’t mean we ought to stop trying. Re-imagining God in a new way can breathe fresh life and vitality to our prayers and spiritual practices when they have grown stale—and it might just heal some of the childhood wounds we’ve been ignoring for so long. As a Catholic feminist, envisioning a Mother God has been simultaneously the most comforting and empowering construct I have yet found.
Shannon K. Evans is a woman with a Catholic spirituality and an interfaith heart. Her passion is opening up deeper waters of contemplating God so that our experience of the Divine grows further loving and curious rather than static and complacent. Her new book The Mystics Would Like a Word is available for preorder.
On My Nightstand
The Anxious Generation: how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness by Jonathan Haidt: This book is chock-full of some hard-to-hear truths. I really enjoy the way Jonathan (author of Coddling of the American Mind, another great read) is able to share data in a way that’s both interesting and not shaming. I really can’t read one more long think piece on how Instagram is ~ruining the world~ because they’re just starting to sound sanctimonious and holier-than-thou but this book is really thoughtful, and not like that at all. We have got to change course on the ways our kids are using smartphones, and fast.
I Don’t Have to Be My Own Pope: My friend
‘s series on why she converted to Catholicism is just fantastic, and I found this latest installment really resonated with me. I’m not a convert but I, too, have a you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do chip on my shoulder I had to walk through when embracing more of my Catholic faith!I Was Supposed to Wake Up in Greece: This piece from
was a wonderful ode to “holy indifference”, a life-changing concept I had to learn in extremely hard ways over the past couple of years.
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Thank you for sharing Shannon K. Evans’ thoughts. I wholeheartedly agree with her insights with the slight exception of when she states that referring to God in masculine terms, “is not something that Christianity does consciously”. That may be true in some communities today, but let’s not forget the conscious suppression of women throughout church history beginning with Mary Magdalene, whose gospel reveals that she was likely person closest to Jesus and “got” his message in a way that the male apostles did not (see Cynthia Bourgeault’s ‘The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity’). The preeminence of the male role throughout church history served to ingrain the male image of God which is still preserved in church structures today. One particular point of contention for me is the continued use of male pronouns for God in the church’s liturgy. Language encodes and reveals our thoughts, and it is not enough to say “we KNOW that God is beyond masculine and feminine categories, but we are still going to refer to God as he/him”. Once we accept this categorization of God, wouldn’t it be logical to ask questions like: how tall is God? how old? what color is God? We would quickly dismiss such questions as absurd, but not so regarding God’s gender. I personally address God as Christ~Sophia, Sophia (meaning Wisdom) being the personification of the divine feminine in the Hebrew scriptures. I grew up in the church at a time when devotion to the Blessed Mother was the order of the day. I even attended Visitation B.V.M. (Blessed Virgin Mary) grade school! Throughout my formative years, I couldn’t relate to this devotion to Mary which seemed to overshadow that of God/Jesus. It just didn’t compute for me. But I am now coming around to appreciating the role of Mary as an expression of the divine feminine (the ‘anima’) which was sorely needed to counterbalance what was the dominant notion of a juridical, stern, and punishing God. It is no wonder that people flocked to Mary as the compassionate and caring mother figure. As we work to meet the challenge of promoting non-binary constructs in society, we must also continue to assert the non-binary nature of the Divine.
Thank you for sharing this insightful and informative essay. I have had similar moments of challenges within the church, especially when I worked at a parish and had to navigate the realities of working with priests steeped in theology but not the smell of their sheep. Quite a mess, even with the support of the pastor.
Thankfully I am also blessed by my conviction that God is greater than the gendered limits of our human imagination. Though I sometimes suffer from despair, I persist in my quiet ways and keep listening. Our Queen of Heaven brings me closer to God… knowing her Son and the Holy Spirit helps me see the awesomeness of the Trinity, which will remain a mystery.