May My Daughter Know God Our Mother
My daughter was not exactly “planned.” Quite the opposite, really. The surprise positive pregnancy test came just a few weeks before my fourth son turned one. We weren’t sure there would be any more babies after him, and certainly not for a few years, but I couldn’t find a trace of anxiety inside myself. I just knew, right from the beginning, that this was my daughter.
Perhaps the sense of deep knowing came because at that time, I was in a reckoning with my faith tradition over the ways God is masculinized at the expense of the feminine. I was angry that God can be called He and not She. I was exhausted by the all-male hierarchy within Catholicism, the church tradition I belong to. I was adamant that Christians needed to be disentangling ourselves from racism, homophobia, colonization, and xenophobia, and I believed that female leadership would move that work forward. I was longing to relate to God as Mother, not just Father, but was unsure whether that would ever feel comfortable.
But I accepted the invitation to reimagine a God I once thought I had understood: the God who is neither male nor female yet both masculine and feminine; the God who shapeshifts into the symbol or metaphor we need at any given moment; the God who transcends language but still invites its use; the God whom some mystics called Mother, and others Lover.