When it comes to the season of Lent, I have come to enjoy not just fasting, but targeting my mind towards something specific. I mentioned previously that each year, Peter Rollins practices Atheism for Lent. In essence you are focusing on something that will truly challenge the boundaries of your faith.
This year I’m looking forward to trying something I thought up as a New Years resolution, but hesitated because it seemed to be too ambitious or limiting.
I want to focus these next 40 days on the Divine Feminine.
The feminine qualities of God. When I pray to God over these next 40 days, I want to pray to the God described throughout the scriptures as a Mother. To put to death the limiting view of a God who is exclusively masculine. And to truly open my hear and my faith to a side of God I ignored much of my life. Obviously God has no gender. And yet growing up I certainly was unable to actually believe that. Each prayer was to a male God. Each conversation references a male deity. Most of the art I encountered was of a bearded man in the clouds. Time to transcend such small containers.
To get the ball rolling. Here’s some Richard Rohr:
“All this women’s stuff is not only important; it is half of conversion, half of salvation, half of wholeness, half of God’s work of art. I believe this mystery is reflected in the woman of the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse: “Pregnant, and in labor, crying aloud in the pangs of childbirth…and finally escaping into the desert until her time’ (Revelation 12:1-6).
Could this be the time? The world is tired of Pentagons and pyramids, prelates and princes, empires and corporations that only abort God’s child. This women’s stuff is very important, and it has always been important, more that this white male priest ever imagined or desired! My God was too small and too male in the first half of my life. It kept me from the deeper mystical path.
Much that many feminists have said is very prophetic and necessary for the Church and the world. It is time for the women to come out of her desert refuge and for the men to welcome her, as we see in the churches today. This is still quite difficult if you have been an “alpha male” all your life. No surprise that Jesus came “meek and humble of heart” to undo the male addiction to power and performance (Matthew 11:29). Mary is the standing archetype of how the gift of God is received. One almost wonders if the Roman and Orthodox church do not worship Mary to avoid actually following her oh-so-natural and simple path.”
Day 1.
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