For redefinition, I was thrown back to myself, to my inner knowing… Marilyn Sewell, Cries of the Spirit

The Authentic Voice Project: Week 7 (Full Moon)

G is for God

I’m cheating this week by letting others speak for me. I came across this just two days ago purely by “accident” – the timing was perfect. So, I will hand over the talking stick first to Marilyn Sewell and then to Mary Daly:

God is a spirit, a mystery beyond human understanding, and therefore we can only approach that mystery through metaphor… The problem is that in the formulation of the religious metaphors we live by, women’s experience has once again been largely discounted. God has been king, prince, lord, father, conqueror, judge… [Let’s evoke] images [that] allow a divinity of softness and vulnerability, of tenderness and nurturance [so] we are led to less fear and to more comfort and hope than traditional images alone have provided…

– Marilyn Sewell, Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women’s Spirituality

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Why indeed must “God” be a noun? Why not a verb – the most active and dynamic of all? Hasn’t the naming of “God” as a noun been an act of murdering that dynamic Verb? And isn’t the Verb infinitely more personal than a mere static noun? The anthropomorphic symbols for God may be intended to convey personality, but they fail to convey that God is Be-ing. Women now who are experiencing the shock of nonbeing and the surge of self-affirmation against this are inclined to perceive transcendence as the Verb in which we participate – live, move, and have our being.

– Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father as quoted in Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women’s Spirituality, edited Marilyn Sewell

Prompt: My metaphor for God/dess (Spirit, Transcendence, Universe) is…

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Photo credit: earl53 from morguefile.com