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| Book cover for "Mother God" |
I got this book for my kids, Mother God, by Teresa Kim Pecinovsky. Here's my review of it.
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Summary
This book tells us that God is our mother, and every page gives examples of the actions She performs as a mother. For example:
Throughout day and night, God wakes
To nurse the infant at Her side.
She snuggles Her baby gently
Until he closes his sleepy eyes.
The inside cover of the book says it contains "a dozen images of God inspired by feminine descriptions from Scripture."
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I have ex-evangelical thoughts about this interpretation of the bible
Some of this imagery I recognized- I know the bible passages that they came from. For example, the page about God the mother hen, gathering Her chicks under Her wings, comes from the words of Jesus in Matthew 23:37, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing."
I wish the book included a list of bible references, because I feel some of these might be a bit of a stretch, and I want to check them. There is one page in this book that says God is a leopard taking care of Her cubs, and I'm trying to figure out where in the bible that is supposedly coming from. I did a search, and the word "leopard" only appears in the bible 8 times. The one that I think "Mother God" must be alluding to is Hosea 13:7-8, which says:
So I will be like a lion to them,
like a leopard I will lurk by the path.
Like a bear robbed of her cubs,
I will attack them and rip them open;
like a lion I will devour them—
a wild animal will tear them apart.
Not really the cheeriest of bible verses.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the imagery of God as a mother leopard. I love that this book has that. I think it's fine to describe God that way, even though the bible doesn't quite do that, not exactly.
It's just that... if you're having an argument with a conservative Christian who believes we're only allowed to talk about God with he/him pronouns, and you want to pull out this book and say "see? The bible itself talks about God with feminine language, so we are so allowed to call God 'her'," well, you're kind of over-selling it. Yes, there are places in the bible where God is described with feminine language. It never goes so far as to use a 'her' pronoun, though. The bible's feminine descriptions of God are comparisons and metaphors, while the masculine ones are literally calling God "he", "Father", "Son", etc. Conservative Christians in arguments about God's pronouns are quick to point this out. They're not really wrong... it's just that... I want to believe in a better God than that, a God who is every gender.
Probably the closest the bible gets to non-metaphorically calling God a woman is 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16, which refers to Jesus Christ as "the wisdom of God" - and this was originally written in Greek, and the Greek word for "wisdom" is "Sophia," which is a feminine name. Christ is the woman, Sophia Wisdom. (Okay, yeah, this is still pretty metaphorical.)
So yes, I love this book, I love every single thing about it, I love when people call God "Her," I love the bible passages which use feminine language or metaphors to describe God. But not every page in "Mother God" is rooted in such a straightforward reading of Scripture that you can use it to win arguments with Christians of the "God is a he/him" persuasion. I mean, personally I'm no longer interested in participating in such arguments, so this is fine for me. But I'm just a bit concerned that this book is misrepresenting itself... if you're coming at it from an evangelical biblical-inerrancy perspective, you expect this book to be "here are bible verses where God is described as/ compared to a woman." But actually, it's more like, "here are bible verses which allow for an interpretation where God is a woman." And I 100% support doing such interpretations. I am so on board with this. But you'll definitely get people responding with "no, that's not what that verse means." (I mean, I agree that in some cases it's not what the verse is supposed to mean. I'm just not so hung up on only being allowed to think about the bible as what it was originally "supposed to mean." It's living and active.)
Another example from "Mother God":
Granny, Baba, Halmeoni,
God is a woman with gray hair.
She passes down stories of old,
Rocking softly in a chair.
This is great, love this, but also, I have no idea what bible passage this is supposedly coming from. I don't even know what search terms to use- "bible verse where God is a grandma telling stories"?????
So yeah, some of these are a bit of a stretch. I'm sure there is some bible verse, perhaps where God is metaphorically compared to someone who tells stories from one's ancestors, and the author of "Mother God" envisions this person as an old, wise grandmother. Yeah, probably it's something along those lines.
Like I said, I think this is great. *My* take on biblical interpretation is that you can use the bible as inspiration for whatever story about God is meaningful for you. Make sure when you do that, though, you don't claim "this is true" or "this is what the bible says." Your interpretation makes sense only to the extent that you can present coherent reasons why it makes sense- you can't claim it's just automatically right because it comes from the bible. This approach is very different from "biblical inerrancy" ideology, where we believed we were very seriously adhering to what God and/or the original writer really meant to say, and so our conclusions just simply were true. (We *believed* that, but in reality, "biblical inerrancy" ideology isn't as unbiased and faithful to the bible as it claims to be...)
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When we call God a woman, does it always have to be in the context of pushing back against patriarchal religion?
Obviously, the reason I love this book has a lot to do with my being a queer Christian with a lifetime of experience hearing people call God "he" but never "she." It just feels so refreshing, to hear people saying that God is a woman.
Also, in the previous section of this blog post, I talked about arguing with conservative Christians who say you're not allowed to call God "she", and the extent to which this book can be used to bolster our side in such arguments.
Ugh, but does it always have to be that way? When we call God "she", does it always have to be about "wow this is great, because everyone always calls God 'he'" and "yes, we *are* allowed to talk about God in this way"? I wish it could just be... that it could just be what it is, rather than needing to be about Taking A Stand Against Patriarchy.
"Mother God" actually starts out by saying,
You know God the Father,
But God is your Mother too.
You are made in Her image--
She is making all things new.
So even this book isn't able to just be about "we are calling God a woman"; it has to be about "we are calling God a woman because everyone always calls God a man." It's unavoidable.
My beliefs about God are in many ways a reaction to the evangelical ideology I was raised in. I always wonder, what does that mean for how I teach my kids? I call God "They" when I talk to my son about what I believe, and the feel of it is like... I'm queer and I chose this. But for him it's never going to feel like that, if he hears someone calling God "They." Soon he'll be at that age where he thinks everything I do is extremely uncool, and that will be the lens he uses to think about the concept of calling God "They."
This isn't just about religion- so many societal trends are like, one generation is reacting to something they didn't like about the way they were raised, but the younger generation didn't have whatever negative experience they are reacting to. The older generation creates a new approach intended to be a healthy correction of the errors of the past, but the younger generation doesn't necessary experience this new approach in that way. Without that context, it will be understood by the younger generation as something else entirely.
So yeah, I bought this book for my kids, but I have no idea what it would be like to grow up with the idea that calling God "she" is just a normal, unremarkable thing. This book means something very different to me than it does to my kids. I don't really know how to understand that. I think it must be a *good* thing to expose them to this idea, and also *not* expose them to the idea that 'we're only allowed to call God he/him or else it's HERESY.' But I can never really *get* how my kids are thinking about this, because for me it always carries that context of rebelling against conservative, patriarchal religion.
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The actions God takes in this book
A lot of the imagery in "Mother God" is about real actions that real people do, and the book says that God is doing these actions. I'm not sure what to make of that. For example:
God is a skillful seamstress
Who stitches and sews thread together.
She makes clothes for rain, snow, and sun,
Caring for you in all kinds of weather.
What does this mean?
- Does it mean that when we see actual real women making clothes, God is there?
- Does it mean that the clothes we wear come from God, in the indirect sense that God created the world and helped people learn the skills to make clothes?
- Does it mean that some of the spiritual things that God does are metaphorically similar to sewing clothes- for example, creating the earth, or perhaps this is a reference to Psalm 139:13, "you knit me together in my mother's womb," where fetal development is metaphorically compared to God knitting?
- Does it mean that when we imagine God performing these feminine-coded actions, like making clothes, that opens up our understanding of God, to help us view God in powerful new ways? Maybe you always imagined God as looking like and acting like your male pastor- but what if you imagine God as a woman making clothes? Don't we believe that a male pastor bears the image of God to the exact same extent that a female seamstress does? Don't we? It brings our biases to the surface and challenges them.
I like interpretations 1 and 4. But I do feel like it's strange, to talk about God doing such concrete actions, and I'm really unclear on what this is intended to mean.
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Wil Gafney endorses this book
I'm such a huge fan of Wil Gafney. I wrote a bunch of blog posts about her book "Womanist Midrash." One of the endorsements on the back cover of "Mother God" was written by her. Obviously I'm going to love anything that Wil Gafney endorses.
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Conclusion
I am so into this book. I love it. I love it because I'm a queer Christian- and so I wonder about how my kids will take it, and what it would be like to grow up with the idea that it's just fine and normal to call God "she."
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Related
"Maybe God Is Like That Too" (kids' book review)
Reviews of Christian Children's Books
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Also please enjoy this song:
Groove Coverage - God is a Girl (Official Video)
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