Given (morning hymn)

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21 күн бұрын

God shows up in a feeling of mutuality, safety, and tenderness. There is no unilateral "be it done unto me" required. It is a gentle "let us sit together and see." The God of my understanding looks not for obedience but rather, freely given affection.
Many of us were raised in churches that, unwittingly or intentionally, perpetuated notions about God that are based on patriarchal frameworks that past generations deemed the "more natural" way of organizing society and family. The idea that it's “more natural" to address God as a male stems from human perspectives, not from divine inspiration (God, in my understanding, is not in the business of perpetuating power imbalances and violent theologies).
While there is nothing wrong with addressing God as Father (and it can in fact be a healing exercise for those who have felt lack of tender fatherly care), the reflexive rejection of worshipping and addressing Deity as Mother strikes me as symptomatic of a deep, habitual pattern of defining the value of maleness as “direct access to power” while simultaneously denigrating the value of femaleness. Femaleness cannot have direct access to power in the patriarchal view, and instead exists as a conduit for male power.
The issue here isn't about who gets to be seen as all-powerful - access to power isn't what liberates. The issue is the way religious fervor around maintaining the differences between maleness and femaleness has ended up furthering the chasm between the two, leading to a spirit of opposition, compartmentalization, and rivalry that wounds faith communities on the micro and the macro level. In the words of Irish writer and poet John O'Donohue,
"The Church [has] a pathological fear of the feminine. It would sooner allow priests to marry than it would allow women to become priests. This awful mistrust of the feminine goes all the way back to Genesis, where Eve is blamed for offering the apple to Adam. . . All extremes create a mirror of themselves. So when you have the demonization of the feminine, you also have the creation of the ideal feminine type: Mary as the perfect woman, on whom no stain of mortality - or complexity - was allowed to fall. None of the awkward, subtle, different, or dark faces of the feminine were allowed near her image. I think it’s a shame, and it has consequences. I think the Church is in danger of losing women. As I’ve said for the last twenty years: if tomorrow all the women in the Catholic Church decided to walk, the Church wouldn’t last three months."
Humans like to dominate one another. We turn a blind eye to systematic injustice, get embroiled in our own sense of being aggrieved, and then we scapegoat, crucify, rinse and repeat. We lock ourselves into a dance of victim vs aggressor, switching roles to suit our agenda. We do this with or without religion, but we enjoy using religion as a "safe container" for this instinct.
Men have historically dominated women because, until recently, they were not expected not to. While we have come a long way as a society to address the harm done to both men and women by patriarchal frameworks, it's a major tragedy that God's nature has been so "pornogrified" by the underbelly of our lesser nature. Just like porn offers a twisted look at women and the nature of sexuality, an enormous amount of religious thought and practice offers up a strictly gendered God who is based upon the projected appetites of men. This has happened with such subtlety and consistency, for so long, that many people mistake anyone who challenges patriarchal behaviors and beliefs in church cultures as an anarchist (!), or anti-masculinity, anti-family, etc.
It can be especially difficult to identify and heal these damaging notions when they're packaged as forms of female empowerment. For example, the church I was raised in purports to revere womanhood to the highest degree, yet its feminine ideal remains a delibinized abstraction that perpetuates the madonna-whore dichotomy, to echo O'Donohue above. And, sadly, there are strains of feminism that are man-hating, full of the very violence they rail against; and these movements have made it difficult for those of us who love and care for men as equals to be taken seriously and sincerely.
“Until we are willing to question many of the specifics of the male sex role, including most of the seven norms and stereotypes that psychologist Robert Levant names in a listing of its chief constituents--'avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality'--we are going to deny men their full humanity. Feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected.”
― bell hooks
Empathy, autonomy, connection. This is where, this is how, God meets us.

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@n_az6760 6 күн бұрын

Long time listener, first time commenter. Your music has been a comfort to me in many iterations of my own spiritual journey. I appreciate not only your music, but also your thoughts. You dig deep and deeper, and challenge me to do the same. Thank you.