This is Superbowl Sunday, that High Holy Day for American football fans - like me. I won't predict the outcome of the game itself, but I will make one prediction in which I have high confidence: Religion will be trivialized. Mark my words, as the winners are interviewed, more than one will praise God for having given him the strength win. And more than one happy athlete will say he couldn't have been the star of the game without the help of Jesus. God and Jesus will clearly be on the side of the winners. You can bet on it. What the equally pious losers will say, I can't imagine.
In a letter to the editor of Sports Illustrated last year, the writer captures my theological sentiments: "To suggest that God really cares about the outcome of a sporting event is preposterous. Conservatively, 20 million people in the U.S. went to bed hungry on Super Bowl Sunday. A God who cares about the outcome of the Super Bowl is not a God I ever want to meet."[1]
Not that football has any monopoly on superficial piety. Baseball great Yogi Berra, constantly underestimated as an intellectual figure in our time, when he saw a batter crossing himself before stepping into the batter's box: "I think God should be allowed to just watch this game."[2]
That God has a certain masculine athleticism is generally accepted in our day. We have long forgotten the pioneering prayers of our 19th century Unitarian prophet, Theodore Parker, who began, "Oh God, our Father and our Mother." For all the gender equality which America claims today, among the remaining bastions of male supremacy is theology - God, for most Americans, including most women, is unquestionably male. After all, the Lord's Prayer - the most important prayer in all Christendom - begins, "Our Father."
It wasn't always so. There is much evidence to suggest that goddesses may have predated gods. Marija Gimbutas in The Language of the Goddess, traces goddess worship back more than 25,000 years in European culture. The Goddess-Mother Creator centers agricultural societies with an emphasis on egalitarianism, non-violence and cooperation. All living things partook of her divinity.
According to Joseph Campbell this "actual age of harmony and peace in accord with the creative energies of nature" for some four thousand prehistoric years preceded the five thousand years of what James Joyce has termed the "'nightmare' of contending tribal and national interests from which it is now certainly time for this planet to wake."[3]
There were goddesses in Hinduism between 2500-1750 Before the Common Era (BCE). In this Vedic period they were mostly identified with natural phenomena. Interestingly, one of the early goddesses was at first a marginal, bloodthirsty figure described in The Mahabharata as "fond of liquor, flesh, and beasts." However, by the 6th century BCE she is called "mother of the universe" and intervenes in human affairs as the great protectress from adversity. From then on goddesses abound - Durga, Mahisha, Kali, among many others. In the pre-historic Paleolithic period the cult of the Mother Goddess represented fertility, and took many forms - Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece.
The most ancient Greek deity was Gaia - the earth - now popularized in ecological, eco-feminist and pagan circles. The earth does not so much have a beginning - and an ending - as it is a cycle or spiral. Sophia Lyon Fahs, one of our finest theologians as well as the mother of Unitarian Universalist religious education, said, "The Universe as a whole may be alive.... The natural order resembles a democracy more than a kingdom, a balanced interdependence better described as cooperation"[4] - or, as we would describe creation, "the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part."
It is fascinating to note that in Arabic Allah, the supreme name for God, is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God - al-Dhat - is feminine."[5] It is even more interesting to know that three Arabian goddesses preceding Allah - al-Lat, "The Goddess," al-Uzza, the Mighty One, and Manat, the Fateful One - the Daughters of God, not in the Koran, came to be considered of Satanic origin - hence, we have the Satanic Verses.[6]
Yahweh, the Hebrew God, was male and while the monotheists of the Axial Age, 800 - 200 BCE, claimed their god transcended gender, he would remain essentially male, and there was a decline in the status of women. According to Karen Armstrong in A History of God, the rise of cities meant the "more masculine qualities of martial, physical strength were exalted over female characteristics.... Yahweh had successfully vanquished the other gods and goddesses of Canaan and the Middle East and become the only God; his religion would be managed almost entirely by men. The cult of the goddesses would be superseded." [7]....
"Instead of making God a symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings," she continues, "it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it absolute. "It makes God behave exactly like us, as though he were simply another human being. Such a God is likely to be more attractive and popular than the God of Amos and Isaiah, who demands ruthless self-criticism.... A personal God like Yahweh can be manipulated to shore up the beleaguered self in this way, as an impersonal deity like Brahman can not."[8]
And so, in this all-too-brief history of God we witness the evolution of deity from a strongly feminine cast integrated with the harmonies of the natural world, in relatively peaceful times, to a powerfully masculine cast associated with historical developments - often the more bloody ones. Well, so what? What difference does it make? Is it not just a matter of one's definition of theological correctness?
As go our gods, so go we. Or, should we say, as we go, so go our gods. I think it was Voltaire who said not only that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent one, but also that God created humanity in God's own image and we returned the favor. The link between human and divine is so symbiotic that a history of God becomes a history of humanity - for good or ill.
A single historical incident indicates how powerful the God image can be for struggling humanity. When one of her followers had been thrown in jail for activities in the cause of women's rights, Emmeline Pankhurst, famous British suffragette, visited the jail to comfort her. Said Mrs. Pankhurst, "Let us pray to God, my dear. She will help us."[9]
Or, you may recall the old joke about the man who died and miraculously came back from Heaven and was white as a sheet, for he had seen God. Asked what God was like, after much hesitation, he replied, "She's black." How our stereotypes reveal our prejudices.
There is a danger, of course, in anthropomorphizing God. Gordon Allport, a Harvard psychologist of religion, once told about a boy of six who refused to say the Lord's Prayer with its opening words, "Our Father." The reason was that his earthly father was an alcoholic and a renegade, and the emotional connotation of "father," as applied to God, was more than he could bear.
My own predilection is not to personalize deity. Frankly, it seems to me arrogant to attribute personality to God; that merely projects the highest we know onto the cosmic screen. We are wonderful creatures, but not half so wonderful as Creation itself - which, after all, created personality. I cannot speak of God's purpose; I do not presume to know or even seek God's will. I believe both enterprises are illustrations of false pride - as if I could discern some divine intent or ferret out a supreme being's intention.
My own concept of God is as a Cosmic Creativity - a mysterious force which of which we have first hand experience, but about which we know so pathetically little - despite all our scientific knowledge and technological wizardry. We do know a fair amount about the "how" of this cosmic process, virtually nothing about the "why." All that is pure speculation.
I know that I am in the tiniest minority, not believing in a personal God who can be known, to whom prayer can be said, to whom will can be attributed, whose very presence in life is personal and sustaining. I admit it is excruciatingly difficult to find spiritual support in life's hard times from so impersonal a thing as a Cosmic Power. I full well understand the temptation to attribute human characteristics to that Power. However, while I respect the perspective of a personal deity who cares about us, - if I am honest with myself I just can't go there.
I think I understand the importance for women to explore the goddess religions of history. The male gods and their worshipers have put women and their spiritual quest down for centuries. I find the history of God fascinating. The image of the masculine God of justice and righteousness - and violence - needs to be balanced by the feminine God of mercy and compassion and peace - though that is without question too simplistic a comparison.
The arrogance of gender-oriented theology is illustrated in this old satirical rendering of a "Report Addressed to the Priests of Nod, dated Nine-nine Years After Creation: Gentlemen: It has come to our attention that the land lies in confusion concerning the deity's sexuality. Many remember the old days, when the Divinity was believed female. The very oldest, having been present at the Creation, say the Creator is like the wind, without sex or countenance. Presently, when hymns or prayers are repeated, partisans shout 'it' or 'she' ad lib, thereby distracting from the worshipful atmosphere. Such squabbling is abhorrent, and disagreement unnecessary. The Council of the Fathers (seers and sages) has taken the matter under advisement. We conclude the Supremacy must resemble those beings whose judgment is flawless and reasoning inerrant, namely, ourselves. (Claim to the contrary would prove the claimant an imposter). We declare, therefore, after scrupulous thought and selfless self-examination, God to be male. He has a white beard, wears sandals, speaks Assyrian and (final evidence He is God) agrees with us."[10]
Feminist theology believes human religious experiences have been so tainted by patriarchy, they are untrustworthy. Feminists would point to the Goddess as a creative life force, partaking of the mystery of life, representing the power of birth, death and regeneration, more immanent than transcendent. Goddess spirituality tends to be nondogmatic, and is based on poetic inspiration and artistic sense rather than a literal set of doctrines or scripture.[11]
Nevertheless, I confess the gender of God is not meaningful to me. I refuse to succumb to the very real temptation to project human personality onto the ultimate ground of our being. Instead, I suggest that the real religious issue here is not the existence of God, nor whether that God - if believed in - is masculine or feminine.
I submit that the real questions are these: are we spiritually alert to the signals of transcendence that surround us? Are we sensitive to the magic of ordinary human existence? Do we pay attention to the miracle of being? And do we transform that gratitude for being into acts of thanksgiving and love and justice? Those questions for me transcend the traditional theological questions.
For example, I am taken by these words of Annie Dillard: "Ten years ago we thought there were two galaxies for each of us alive. Lately, since we loosed the Hubble Space Telescope, we have revised our figures. There are nine galaxies for each of us. Each galaxy harbors an average of 100 billion suns. In our galaxy, there are 69 suns for each person alive. The Hubble shows, says a report, that the universe 'is at least 15 billion years old.' Two galaxies, nine galaxies, 69 suns, 100 billion suns - these astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death."[12]
That is the big picture, the cosmic perspective. There is a more intimate and homely perspective. At another point Dillard writes,
"Every day is a god, each day is a god,
and holiness holds forth in time.
I worship each god,
I praise each day splintered dawn,
And wrapped in time like a husk,
A husk of many colors spreading,
At dawn fast over the mountains split."[13]
I am left with a kind of mystical agnosticism. I celebrate a power greater than I can imagine, but doubt that it is a cosmic consciousness. God, for me, becomes the "binding element in the universe."[14] I take courage from the healing powers of that universe. I give thanks for being its creature. I am blessed beyond all telling to be a part of this cosmic process.
Kenneth Boulding sums it up for me:
"Can I, imprisoned, body-bounded, touch
The starry robe of God, and from my soul,
My tiny Part, reach forth to (this) great Whole,
And spread my Little to the infinite Much,
When Truth forever slips from out my clutch,
And what I take indeed, I do but dole
In cupfuls from a rimless ocean-bowl
That holds a million million such?And yet, some Thing that moves among the stars,
And holds the cosmos in a web of law,
Moves too in me: a hunger, a quick thaw
Of soul that liquefies the ancient bars,
As I, a member of creation, sing
The burning oneness binding everything."[15]
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