dance, then, wherever you may be

spiritual/religious blog of a christian north witch called rhys. enjoy! free tarot readings are currently closed.

[hymnsofheresy]

“Time and time again we hear in church that we must be ready to give up even our most cherished possessions if we are to be true disciples. For years I had been clinging to an inherited belief in God: and do you blame me? To give it up would be to risk not only my religion but my reputation, my job, my home, my social world, in short my whole way of life. Yet once I did it, once I was able to admit to the possibility that I did not believe in God, wonderful things started to happen. Anxious friends asked whether I had lost my faith. I was able to assure them that I had not. I had given it away: given away my old second-hand faith and so been free to discover what I myself really believed. One of the things I found was that in a new way I could give real meaning to belief in God. That, surely, is authentic Christian grace. That, surely, is the gift of faith.”

— Anthony Freeman, God in Us  (via godinourhands)

[meansofgrace]

[moishe-pipick]

[cruciform-solidarity]

If the name of God and the name of God alone is now truly unspeakable, our pronunciations of the name of God will inevitably be mispronunciations, and mispronunciations precisely to the extent that they can be heard.

Thomas J.J. Altizer, Godhead and the Nothing

[serratedpens]

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

[catholic-church-official]

his nayme is Christ who on thys night hath filled the world with hope and light he rose from death set sinners free o hell where is thy victory?

[notalwaysluminous]

why lik teh bred when you can BE teh bred? 

[dorks-infiction]

…@mememic-bry

[surfeit-of-stoats]

#our nayms the church#and on thys morn#we syng becus the veyl was torn#remembring Christ rose from the ded#we kepe the feast;#we eat the Bred (via @mememic-bry)

[thathopeyetlives]

It got better.

[ponyoisms]

t shirt that says YOU DONT UNDERSTAND MY RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD and the back says NEITHER DO I

[magpie-trove]

The first verse of What Child is This but over a painting of the Pieta

[magpie-trove]

[weaponsofclairvoyance]

well then which historical figure wears mcr binders

joan of arc do you even need to ask

[sundewbaby]

Love and light yeah but also sacred rage and darkness

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

Feminine language for God in Christian history: a brief timeline

People have been employing words and images for the Divine that move beyond the masculine from the very start. I thought I’d compile some examples chronologically. 

Links in any of the points lead fuller explanations or excerpts. Feel free to add on to this timeline!

First Century: 

Paul himself, right there in the canonical Bible, implies that God is pregnant with all that exists! And he’s not pulling that image out of nowhere, but from his own Jewish scriptures.

100s:

“In his ineffable essence he is father; in his compassion to us he became mother. The father by loving becomes feminine.” - St. Clement of Alexandria

200s/300s:

“Come, secret Mother; Come, You who (fem.) are manifest in your deeds; You who (fem.) give joy and rest to those who are united to You (fem.)” - The Acts of Thomas .

”She is the kind and heavenly mother…” - Symeon of Mesopotamia (speaking of the Holy Spirit) .

St. Barbara envisions both God and those who follow God as Saints as being beyond the human gender binary

300s-400s:

the earliest Syriac Christians frequently employed feminine language to all three members of the Trinity, including Mother language for God and sometimes using She pronouns for the Holy Spirit .

“He who has promised us heavenly food has nourished us on milk, having recourse to a mother’s tenderness. For just as a mother, suckling her infant, transfers from her flesh the very same food which otherwise would be unsuited to a babe…so our Lord, in order to convert His wisdom into milk for our benefit came to us clothed in flesh.” - St. Augustine of Hippo 

1000s-1100s:

“And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother? Are you not the mother who, like a hen, gathers her chickens under her wings? …. And you, my soul, dead in yourself, run under the wings of Jesus your mother and lament your griefs under feathers. Ask that your wounds may be healed and that, comforted, you may live again.” - St. Anselm of Canterbury  .

“In Hildegard’s day there were other traditionally feminine theological ideas: for instance, the Cistercians feminized the language for God by replacing ‘God’ with ‘God is love’, and, because love (caritas) was a feminine noun, God could be denoted as ‘she’.” - Andrea Janelle Dickens

1200s:

“What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From the beginning of eternity, God lies on a maternity bed giving birth to all.”  - Meister Eckhart, German theologian (c. 1260 – c. 1328) .

St. Francis of Assisi envisioned the Trinity as a group of three women (who give him a feminine title!): “Three poor women appeared by the road as Saint Francis was passing. They were so similar in stature, age, and face that you would think they were a three-part piece of matter, modeled by one form. As Saint Francis approached, they reverently bowed their heads, and hailed him with a new greeting, saying: ‘Welcome, Lady Poverty!’”

1300s:

“As we know, our own mother bore us only into pain and dying. But our true mother Jesus, who is all love, bears us into joy and endless living.” - Julian of Norwich  .

In various places in medieval Europe starting around 1320, Jesus’s side wound was frequently depicted as a vulva. Scholars have suggested various reasons for this depiction, including: making Christ androgynous as androgyny was seen as more holy than belonging to an earthly (binary) gender; and helping women see themselves in their Lord (birthing girdles were even made bearing Christ’s wounds so that one could imagine their labor pains in parallel to Jesus’s pain on the cross) - See my #androgynous Christ tag for more info + scholarly sources

1400s-1500s

Madre Juana de la Cruz in Spain imagines the Trinity as working together to weave divinity and humanity into one being (Jesus), just as a seamstress sews a shirt. She also envisions God the Father as having a womb, and, speaking in the voice of Jesus, said: “And all those who seek in me a father, will find in me a father. And those who seek in me a mother, will find in me a mother. And those who seek in me a husband, will find in me a husband. And those who seek in me a bride, will find in me a bride. And those who seek in me a brother, or a friend, or a neighbor, or a companion, likewise will find in me everything they desire…” .

A convent in Belgium commissioned a painting of Jesus in which he has breasts  .

God cares for us with an everlasting maternal heart and feeling.” - Martin Luther, who also pictured scripture as God’s womb.

1800s:

1800s: “My Father, my Mother, it is in You that I sleep, it is in You that I breathe. Awaken!” - Saint Mariam Baouardy (1846 – 1878)

I recommend Lynn Japinga’s article “Language about God” for information on how and why to expand what gendered language one uses for the Divine. I share excerpts from the article in this post, as well as a link to the full thing.

[beguines]

It is dark because it gives too much light, an 'excess' of light. You can look freely at the stars, but look at the sun and it will blind you; you can pick out features at a distance, but if the object is eye-close, you cannot focus. So when God is communicating himself to the soul, the mind's natural field of vision has too narrow a range, and we have to engage by believing, not by focusing. Were faith to open us merely to a world of sharper ideas or more vivid impressions, then its light would indeed look bright. As it opens us to God, its light blinds us.

Faith, then, is dark, not because God is distant, but because he is eyeclose, soul-close. In faith is God, 'communicating himself to the soul'

Iain Matthew, The Impact of God: Soundings from St. John of the Cross

[givemearmstopraywith]

God is real and he is my best friend. my worst enemy. he’s my mother. he’s the love of my life. he’s every stranger i’ve ever felt love towards. he’s my poor little meow meow. he’s my grecian tragedy. he’s my war hero. he’s my everything. he’s the blood in my veins and the veins holding my blood and the delicate sinew that connects me to the universe. he is all the love ive ever felt. he’s nothing. he’s the hole in my soul. he’s every cut that’s ever healed. my wine aunt. my teacher. my boyfriend. me.

[lovemanythings]

“the sun” by edvard munch (1909)

[dasht-ae-tanhai]

[vviatrix-blog]

biblical literalism & the idea that scripture is the source and summit of Christianity is so all pervasive that my agnostic-atheist boyfriend can’t understand why I believe in god if I don’t believe everything in the bible is literally true. he’s very respectful and tries to understand but like a lot of ppl can’t even conceive of any possible foundation for religion outside believing that every word of scripture is a literal fact.

biblical literalism/inerrancy is one of the shakiest possible foundations for faith. the minute you consider the possibility that it took more than six days for life on earth to exist, that the sun may not have literally stopped in the sky for joshua, that the events of exodus probably didn’t happen as described, the whole thing comes crashing down. and people who might otherwise at least explore belief in god are shut out bc they can’t convince themselves that there were giant angel hybrids crawling all over the earth before an apocalyptic Flood or that we’ll all be snatched up bodily in a Rapture or whatever.

that whole ideology disrespects sacred scripture and turns people away from god and god-given reason imho

[cruciform-solidarity]

“I cannot see Him because he is my eyes. I cannot hear Him because He is my ears. I cannot walk to him because He is my feet. And if apparently I am alone and He is not there that is because He will not separate His presence from my own. If He is not anything at all, if He is nothing, that is because He is no longer another. I must find Him in what I am or not at all.”

— H. A. Williams, Tensions