Two weeks ago, after Sunday service in Lindsey Chapel, a couple new to Emmanuel stopped on the way out to talk with me about their impressions of our service. She had grown up Episcopalian; he had been Roman Catholic. They said that, for the most part, our service was familiar. But there was one thing that was new to them here, and the husband asked about it. When the people around him prayed the Creed, where it speaks of the Holy Spirit, he heard them use a feminine pronoun: With the Father and the Son she is worshipped and glorified / She has spoken through the prophets. “They don’t say that in the church where I come from!” he said. “What’s up with that?” he wondered.
The quick and easy answer is that comes from Emmanuel’s longstanding commitment to inclusive language in worship, a commitment that is reprinted in the bulletin each week:
In order that the language we use to speak about God and ourselves remains faithful to the Gospel and relevant to the experience of all people, we believe it must make every effort to speak of God, Christ, and our humanity in both male and female images. In accordance with this commitment, everyone is welcome to make changes in the language of the liturgy and in the hymns to that which is more fully inclusive.
But it goes back much farther than 1986. There are ancient traditions of speech about God that draw on female images and language. Those traditions, sometimes submerged and hidden, embody essential insights about God and humanity without which the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are dangerously distorted.
Those three are the “religions of the Book”, the world religions that originated in the Semitic cultures of the ancient Middle East. Each uniquely traces its origin to the Bible. In the shorthand compressed form of biblical story, Abraham is the father of all these faiths. Sarah his wife gave birth to Isaac, through whom Israel traces its lineage. But before Sarah’s son was born, Abraham had a son by Hagar, Sarah’s slave. Islam claims its inheritance through Hagar’s boy, Ishmael. Jesus was born into Judaism, and formed his soul by the songs and the prophets of Israel. Through Jesus, Christianity claims the patrimony of Abraham by adoption; even those of us who are not Semitic are “born into Christ” in baptism, and partake in the ancient lineage sacramentally in the bread and wine of Eucharist.
In prehistoric times, the people who would become the Hebrews worshipped many gods. Almost certainly, in time out of memory, there was a goddess in Israel. As their culture evolved, they came to understand that, though there may be many gods, they were to be faithful to only one, the most high god that Moses encountered in the fire and cloud of the mountain, Yahweh, imaged as a powerful male judge and ruler. In time, they came to believe that this one is the only God—the Lord Most High, Adonai, the God and Father of Israel. Islam would call this God Allah.
But even as monotheism grew out of the Abrahamic tradition, at the heart of the faith is the understanding that no image of God—no drawing, or carving or sculpture, no word picture, nor even a philosophical idea—nothing we can make—can grasp, without remainder, the holy mystery. We cannot comprehend God, because God comprehends us. That is, although our minds and desires are bent on infinity, we are finite, so the mystery of being will always be beyond our grasp. God infinitely transcends us.
No image can capture God or define infinite transcendence—God will be forever and irreducibly more than we can imagine. But here’s the paradox: even though the mystery before which we stand is unspeakable, we cannot stop speaking about it! It is infinitely fascinating, infinitely attractive to us, because we are made of it and for it. So speak we do, and draw, carve, sculpt, write, and sing about it. Sometimes, we fall silent, entering into the cloud of unknowing in which our images are set aside, where, without words or images or concepts, we contemplate the mystery of being. We contemplate the transcendent, without trying to reduce it to thought. This kind of unknowing knowing is kin to Zen Buddhist meditation. It a very liberating form of prayer, a very ancient and wonderful part of the Christian spiritual tradition.
But wordless prayer is not for everyone, and not for anyone all the time. Regularly, we repair to the expressive arts of liturgy to refresh our sense of the holy and our belonging to community. Most of our prayer and theology uses images to orient us to the transcendent mystery. Our images organize and direct us—our thoughts and emotions and the way we order our relationships and our politics—towards the mystery in which we live and move and have our being.
For example, when our tradition calls God “Father” we affirm that the Holy One is generative of life, of our own personal lives, that we matter in the great scheme of things, and that the universe is providential. Speech about God as “King” expresses in ancient political metaphor the human hunger for justice and right relationship in society, and humanity’s need for a higher law to govern human affairs.
Speech about God’s holy wisdom connects to divine creativity and to humanity’s unrestricted desire to know—to discover and to understand the world about us, and through it to know something about the mystery in which we have our being. In the Wisdom of Solomon, divine wisdom is personified as a woman. She is “a reflection of eternal light, an image of divine goodness”. She is the “fashioner of all things” through whom God delighted to create the world. At the beginning of time, she danced with delight before the eternal throne, God’s dear child, creativity itself. “She is more beautiful than the sun,” of another order than daylight; for day is overcome by the night, but the darkness does not overcome her.
You may hear in this familiar language, from the prologue of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What came into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.
Or this echo from the Epistle to the Hebrews: God has spoken to us through the Son through whom he created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory, the exact imprint of God’s very being, who sustains all things.
When the first Christians tried to understand what Jesus Christ meant to them, what he revealed to them of divinity, they drew on the wisdom traditions. They did some first century gender bending, at some level aware that gender is not absolute, for are not male and female alike “in the image of God” as Genesis says? They described Christ in the same language used to speak of Lady Wisdom; for this reason, one writer calls Jesus Sophia’s son.
Primordial goddess; holy wisdom; Sophia’s son—these are attributes of the transcendent that speak of fruitfulness and creativity, of delight in the world, and the unrestricted desire to know. She is the spirit from whom science springs, and she is the fountain of creativity. Her attributes were mediated in the medieval church through the cult of the Virgin Mother, who inspired, among other things, gothic architecture. The architecture and decoration of Lindsey Chapel inherits this long tradition of Lady Wisdom, mother of compassion and giver of life. You see her images all around you in the Chapel, and her daughters, many women of profound understanding, high courage, and indomitable spirit, are represented in the alabaster figures over the altar. There, the risen Christ is depicted in the company of the holy women who were “friends of God, and prophets.”
But all of these images—the Virgin, Lady Wisdom, the prefiguring goddess—finally, I believe, represent aspects of the one holy mystery. Lady Wisdom is the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit of whom the Creed speaks. She personifies that mystery before which we must fall silent, about which we cannot help but speak, even using archaic languages of bible and creed, that yet may help us to transcend our time-bound world, inviting us into the conversation of the ages:
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the giver of life ... with the Father and the Son, She is worshipped and glorified. In every generation she passes into holy souls, and makes them friends of God and prophets. She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well.