On Saying "Our Father"
This is about prayer and gender, but first I have to tell you about the time someone tried to get me to eat horse meat.
No, I did not want to try the horse meat pizza.
This was a little over a decade ago, and I met up with two friends at an Italian restaurant in Berlin. My friend Daniel ordered horse pizza. He was a very thoughtful person and gave lots of consideration to what he ate and why (now he’s a philosophy of religion professor). And if one was going to eat beef and pork, he saw no reason not to eat horse. It wasn’t too long ago that poorer (and even less poor) people in the regions whose food we oddly think of as haute cuisine ate whatever was available more often than not, surviving winter being a pretty high priority. Horse meat is used in many regional Italian cuisines and shows up in some other places in Europe from time to time, though the Germans were furious when they discovered that a lot of what had been sold as cheap beef in the earlier years of the last decade was actually horse. I think the English and Americans are fairly unique in our principled aversion, except for my friend who rightly pointed out that there wasn’t a very good reason.
So did I want to try it?
No. I did not and still have not. But why not?
Well, when I ate beef, chicken, and the occasional pork back in those days, I didn’t really think about the fact that I was eating an animal. With lamb I did, but I could turn it off with a bit of effort. With horse, there was no way I was going to be able to turn it off, or even suppress my gag reflex. So no, there was no logical reason, and I would eat it before I starved, but I was not going to eat it that night. My friend was happy to accept that, but pointed out that in the case of meats I was comfortable eating, it was because the work I would have to do to enjoy eating horse (or at least not gag) had already been done and was constantly being done.
But I am not here to convince you to try horse meat like Daniel, or to stop eating meat altogether as I have since done (another time, perhaps). I actually want to talk about prayer, and again, not to convince you to take it up (another rain check, please), but to report on an experiment I have been trying.
An Advent Experiment
Since the beginning of Advent, I have been fairly exclusively using female names and pronouns for God. Like most people (or at least theologically trained people) in my neighborhood of liberal-tending American Christianity, I have long gone at least a little out of the way to avoiding “Father” and “he” when using my own words, though I have generally stuck to the script when there is one (e.g. the the prayer book). Verena told me years ago that she did not think that simply replacing all the “he’s” with “God” was really an adequate way to displace the male God in most people’s imaginations, though it was Wil Gafney’s introduction to her Womanist Lectionary that immediately prompted my little experiment. They’re both right, of course. “God” is an easy calque on “he” that lets us leave the implicit maleness of God quite intact.
Implicit, I am quick to stress. I have believed and taught for years that no human language or concept is adequate to name God, I have been drawn to theologians who emphasize this, and have given many sermons to the effect that the God who cannot be adequately named can be worshiped with the full range of our words and images, though these must eventually be transcended. I have never gotten much push back on this. Furthermore, I have longed consciously believed that human beings, “male and female” are created according to the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), who thus cannot be either one.
And I have Bryce Rich to thank for pointing out to me years ago that both male and female are undone in Christ (Galatians 2:38). Whatever sex and gender are, they are real, but have no final reality, and I periodically wondered whether “non-binary” was a more useful description for myself than “eccentrically male” (I have consistently decided that ‘he’ feels the least wrong of the available options, at least for now). So there is no reason, I argued, why the genders of scripture and liturgy could not be approached as concessions to the cultures and grammars of the languages in which they are written, but not binding. I have always had female pastors and priests in my life and was proud to be ordained a deacon by female bishop (a lesbian at that). And before my kids started seeing me presiding regularly (they were four when I was ordained to the priesthood), they had rarely seen anyone but a women in that roll.
All of this is absolutely correct. But I used to let myself off the hook somewhat. It shouldn’t really matter whether we God “Father,” I reasoned. And those who want to call God “Mother” or “Parent” or whatever else were welcome to, but I did not need to.
So yeah, I was wrong about that.
I know I was wrong because when my sons have heard me calling God “Mother” and “she” for the last few weeks, they tried to correct me. “He is a boy,” one insisted. I would like to protest that they did not get this from me, but let’s face it: they did, at least partially. Furthermore, as feminists and womanists have been saying for decades and longer: if it really doesn’t matter what language we use, why can’t you be the one to change yours? Well, I did for this season.
I have been reading “Mother” instead of “Father” and “she” instead of “he” in the prayer book and psalter (though not the rest of the Bible), and in conversation. I have been doing this both at home and at church.
Sometimes it feels very edifying. It allows an affective response to certain prayers and psalms that I had not felt before, and lets me imagine various women I admire when I say the words. I also find myself imagining genderqueer people a lot, because I am juxtaposing “she” and “Mother” with “Lord” and “King.” But it’s not those experiences that have convinced me that this needs to be done more often. It is the vast majority of the time when it feels like having my shoes on the wrong feet and I actually quite dislike it.
Affective Infrastructure
When I pray to “Our Father,” I do not really imagine my father, nor myself in my capacity as father. The word has been somewhat evacuated of meaning for me in liturgical contexts. But when I pray to “Our Mother,” it is emotionally fraught because I do think of my mother, as well as my wife as mother to our kids. I have good relationships with both of these women, but they are not simple relationships. These are people who I have been very mad at, who I sometimes think are behaving and thinking stupidly, whom I sometimes need some time apart from. They would say the same thing about me, though my mom and I get more time apart than either of us really wishes for, since I live on another continent.
I don’t mean to suggest that praying to God as Father is entirely uncomplicated. When someone dwells on the image or features it prominently in a hymn, I cringe as much as the next people. When a German hymn I otherwise love says that God is “merciful, patient, and gracious; much more than a father can be” (and he “loves you even when you cause him grief”), I feel a bit dirty. The language could theoretically subvert the father imagery for God, but I think that even in making human fatherhood the consistent point of contrast for God (especially if it’s “God’s fatherhood,”) it makes it normative. And if my kids are taking me as their point of departure in naming and understanding God, then it gets pretty damn complicated and also—shudder. But when it’s just the Lord’s Prayer or the Creed or male pronouns in the psalms, I do not have this reaction.
It is easy enough to suppress these thoughts and feelings because most of the work has already been done for me, just as the work of not responding to the meat I used to eat as a dead animal has already been done again and again for generations. To take a phrase from Yannik Thiem, the “affective infrastructure” is in place and functions so well that we usually don’t notice it at all. In fact, we only notice it when it breaks, or encounters something it can’t handle. In my case, horse pizza. A similar infrastructure, built and maintained over generations, makes it relatively easy to disconnect praying to God as Father from my cognitive and emotional experiences of my relationships with my own father or my own children. I only notice that affective infrastructure when I start trying to pray to God as Mother, and discover that it can’t carry the load so seamlessly.
The fact that cultures have these affective infrastructures is not a problem, at least not as I see it. It is completely unavoidable, and it is basically what enables us to do anything at all. We socialize ourselves and our children so that basic traffic laws are so internalized that we don’t have to think about them. But try driving (or walking or riding a bike) in another country, and you notice them, even when the laws are basically the same. The Netherlands often has separate traffic signals for cars, pedestrians, and bikes. I have sat through the bike’s green many times because I forget to look to for it (also, it’s in a funny spot), and honestly, I still have no idea who has right of way in the intersection in front of my building. The problem is that because they are invisible, we don’t notice them even when they are producing suffering and evil, and because they fairly easily assimilate most of the things we do to try to mitigate that evil. It turns out that changing all the “he’s” to “God’s” and severing the conscious association of God the Father from the fathers we know does little or nothing to dismantle the affective infrastructure of patriarchy.
God is not a mother anymore than God is a father, but at least calling God “Mother” and consciously experiencing the complexity can draw our attention to what is happening when we call God “Father,” or even when we call God “God.” These names and all the others are steps on the way to coming to know God, but the really great teachers of our tradition tell us to notice them and what they do, but not identify with them. God always wants to give us more than we can name, and always is more. The Greek monastic tradition (which entered the Latin church through Cassian) tells us that image-less contemplation is the goal in this life (yes, these are the same people who fill their churches with such exuberant color and icons. We have to start where we are. And because this is the religion of the Incarnation, bodies and images are never really left behind). But we must learn to say and perceive in a way that makes the thing said or perceived transparent.
And while experiencing God as Mother with all its complexities (and then hopefully also beginning to experience those complexities with God as Father or God as God) is not going to demolish the affective infrastructure of patriarchy in one fell swoop, it may shake a brick or two loose, and maybe we can be thoughtful about how we rebuild it.
It can also have some pretty practical effects in the meantime, while we’re still on the way to that image-less contemplation and a world free of gender oppression. If you’re still with me, I’ll conclude with a field report and a suggestion.
The Practical Part
Psalm 30 came up in the evening lectionary a few days ago. It has long been a favorite. Verse five reads, “For her wrath endures but the twinkling of an eye, her favor for a lifetime.” When I read that with male pronouns (doing work to try to avoid imagining a male God), I think of profound existential crises, times when I as a teenager or younger adult was in despair over why evil happens, or why I felt like I had to be a pastor, or when some crush wasn’t reciprocated, or mortality had impinged upon my awareness. I would recite this psalm with great pathos. Or perhaps I experienced it more abstractly. Perhaps I was giving voice to ancient Israel in exile, or the tragic suffering of humanity.
But on Saturday, I prayed Psalm 30 and found myself imagining an argument with my wife. I imagine she’s mad at me. Maybe I know on some level that she’s right, maybe I legitimately disagree with her. But it’s an awful feeling. Some people just give in no matter what, only to make it go away. What if she doesn’t come back around, after all? What if neither of us decides we were wrong? What if this is what it’s like for ever? It doesn’t matter how long you have been together and how many times you have worked through this moment before, you will still be at least briefly terrified at the thought that this time, you might not get past this. “Then you hid your face, and I was filled with fear,” we read a few verses later. This was a way more complicated experience of this psalm than I had ever had before.
But I think it might also be pretty nice to remember next time there is an argument. This psalm isn’t just about an individual and his or her (but let’s face it, we’ve usually meant “his”) cry out to God in the midst of his feelings of abandonment (though it is of course also that). This text, this site of looking for and finding God is also about those times when the emotional drain of your family gets clogged, and you all start acting (and thinking, and feeling) in the most dysfunctional ways you’re capable of (and probably swore at some point you weren’t going to do anymore), and everyone goes to bed mad at everyone else, and you’re scared of what you’re going to find in the morning.
I mean, I have no experience of this personally (😅), but this is what I imagine other people’s lives are like. But if it were my life, might it help to remember that this is not just free-floating anger, resentment, and hostility, but a process happening within the body of Christ? That you have in fact welcomed each other into your lives as Christ has welcomed you into his, and if you are communicants, that Christ is in your own very bodies? Perhaps your fight is an angry prayer after all (I promised I wasn’t going to try to talk you into praying, but it’s not my fault if I catch you doing it unprompted). And maybe you will remember that just as God’s joy comes in the morning, so might yours and your partner’s or children’s (or whoever else’s), and that your joy is really just an expression of God’s joy, and it is not ultimately up to you to produce it.
Great post! I'll admit that over years of parochial indifference to this question I have begun to ignore and downplay it, so this was a very helpful corrective.