THE FEMININE GOD
She was there at the beginning…
Rediscovering God’s feminine side: Part Three
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And She was hovering over the face of the waters…
Now there is a beginning full of tender promise.
When I heard a womanist theologian translate the start of Genesis this way, I was first jarred — and then enchanted.
The word for spirit and wind and breath that we translate as the Holy Spirit is a feminine word. A feminine word for a feminine spirit. And the hovering suggests the protective hovering of a mother bird over her chicks.
A riot of images is sparked by these words. The curvature of the earth is the round belly of a woman that her hands caress in tender expectation.
There is the waiting in the darkness before life and light spring forth, and barren rock becomes the opening credits of Life on Earth. Blue oceans. Flying fish. Giraffe running across the grasslands.
I want to weep with the beauty of it all, and I have a moment of knowing that it is in This God that my female soul finds her source.
This is a good place to start our journey. Those few words at the beginning of the Bible are the echo of the many faces of the feminine divine we will meet as we walk through its pages.
The Holy Spirit, God’s creative wisdom and midwifery, echoes of the first chapter of John’s Gospel, where we hear that Jesus was here at the beginning and that if we believe, we too will be born of God. And, of course, God the Mother.
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