Lent, Day 34

Who is this mistress of the house-hold to whom we human beings look for guidance, assistance, and compassion?

Yahweh is, then, not only our Father and Master who is in heaven, but also our Mother and Mistress who is in heaven. If anyone needs any scriptural authorization to address the Lord’s prayer to both Father and Mother, Psalm 123:1-2, with its male-female parallelism concerning the divine, would seem to provide that sanction. The addition would not constitute a judgement on the teaching of Jesus, as if he should have said “Our Father and Mother” in the first place. Because Jesus was living in a patriarchal culture, calling for truly stupendous changes, he had to speak terminology that the people could grasp. The more unfamiliar and radical the concept, the more familiar and unthreatening the language had to be! Jesus modelled the full equality of males and females; to have introduced directly a female image of God would at the time have been misunderstood as a reversion to paganism’s multiplicity of divinities. Jesus did utilize word-pictures of God as female. But on good thing about word-pictures is that their significance does not dawn upon anybody who is not ready or able to receive them. Jesus’ cultural surroundings made “Our Father and Mother in heaven” an impossibility; our cultural surroundings make it not only possible but necessary. With the advantage of the whole Hebrew and Christian Scriptures to guide our thinking, we are enabled to understand that recognizing Yahweh’s female component is not a reversion to paganism, but rather a deepening toward a fuller and healthier orthodoxy.

-The Divine Feminine, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott