The Missing Piece to Faith-full Peacemaking: Integrating the Feminine Divine
Anna Beth Roeschley
As a peacemaker concerned with conflict transformation, social justice, the environment, and the empowerment of women (and other oppressed groups of people), as well being a peacemaker seeking to live out of a rooted faith perspective, one thing I have learned is that peace-building is not a simple, straightforward, or linear thing. Working to build shalom and transform injustice is a multi-faceted, inter-related, process-based endeavor. Peace – in a nutshell – is about connectedness.
This learning became especially apparent to me a couple of years ago as I confronted a perceived sense of disconnect among these named aspects of peacemaking, particularly within my faith tradition, which resulted in a set of deep tensions and questions for me. I was on the verge of grounding a feminist outlook, broadening my understanding of the global community and the inter-connectedness of people and problems, developing a compelling compassion and conviction for the care of Earth, and, while I sensed a relatedness among all of these issues, something about them was not jiving with my encounter and conception of God at the time. And I wasn’t all alone -- others alongside me were asking some of the same questions. If, for example, our bodies are inherently linked with sinful nature, and therefore bad, as the Christian tradition has tended to stress, what kind of implications does that have when extended to how we treat our bodies? or how we treat other bodies? What would it mean to live as creations among Creation rather than as creatures above, dominating and ruling creation? If our image of who God is guides and shapes who we are, what does it mean that that image has traditionally been constructed and determined primarily by males? And, what would it be like to actively embrace not only a Father God, but a Mother God, a God who is not just above the earth, in the sky, but part of the earth, the life-force that enlivens and sustains all?
Despite being called a God of love and peace, things about this God reinforced these hierarchies I was reacting against – this “sky” God, up above, disconnected from earth; a God of mind and spirit who is ultimately concerned only with my soul; a God who, despite my convictions otherwise, kept showing up as male, not to mention white and western. How could this God alone serve as a model for how we are to live at peace with all of Creation, when within this God’s created order humans are above the earth, men are above women, and our minds and souls are above our physical bodies?
I spent this past year exploring some of these very questions in my departmental honors project, which focuses on this mind-body dualism and the way that it has played out in my fields of Communication and Religion. In this project I maintain that this split between mind and body is closely connected to the exclusion of the Feminine Divine in our encounter and conception of the Divine. This division between mind and body has as permeated our western, patriarchal, anthropocentric, phallogocentric society and church, (phallogocentric meaning the connection between centrality of word and reason to the centrality of the phallus), and this mind-body division is reflected in other divisions I named such as man over woman and human over earth. I suggest that reclaiming and embodying the Feminine Divine will compel us to think and act and live our lives differently, in ways that recognize our position as embodied creatures.
I will take a moment to offer a brief clarification about what I mean when I say Feminine Divine, as this is term that has a tendency to make people uneasy. The Feminine Divine, Mother God, Sacred Feminine, and Goddess are commonly understood, or rather misunderstood, to be un-Christian, idolatrous, indicators of an “other God,” and associated with pantheism. I appreciate how Sue Monk Kidd, author on women’s spirituality, describes this anxiety among people. She says, “Thousands of years of repression, hostility, and conditioning against a Divine Mother have made a deep impression on us. We’ve been conditioned to shrink back from the Sacred Feminine, to fear it, to think of it as sinful, even to revile it…[but] in the end, “Goddess” is just a word. It simply means divine in female form.”
To this some may be tempted to respond, “Well, if it is just a word, and if God is really formless anyway – for what word or image can ever fully describe God? – then what is really the big deal?” Kidd goes on to explain that the even the word “God” does not typically register in us as neuter. She says, “Technically it may not imply any particular gender, but what registers and functions in the mind is male” (140).
The Feminine Divine, along with the voices of women in church history and an egalitarian model Christian church, have all become a suppressed within the Christian tradition throughout the centuries. I choose to support an interpretation of the Bible and of Christianity which does not see the subjugation of the feminine as inherent or intrinsic to the Christian faith, but rather as an indication of this tradition’s brokenness. A faith tradition lacking a Feminine Divine and the voices of women is incomplete and in need of wholeness.
As peacemakers seeking to live out of a faith perspective, it is thus imperative that we call into question our conception of God and our encounter of this God, and ask what kind of implications this image and encounter has, as I raised earlier. How does our perception of God shape who we are, how we live as faithful creatures with the rest of Creation? How does it serve to either enable or disable us in working for transformation, hope, and healing in our world? In what ways would the re-integration of a Feminine Divine into our image and encounter with God bring us closer to holistic peacemaking?
For me, embracing the Feminine Divine became crucial in seeking to address these questions and the tensions I named earlier regarding the division between mind and body. I began to recognize the Feminine Divine as the locus in which the passions and concerns that motivated my efforts for peace and justice intersected – that is, concern for conflict transformation, social justice, feminism, environmentalism. As the inter-connector and sustainer of all life, the Feminine Divine draws these all together and reminds us of our embodied position, compels us to love and care for our bodies, and other bodies, in light of their sacredness. The Feminine Divine also reminds us of our connection to Earth and the interconnectedness of all Creation. We are coming to realize the full impacts of this one more and more as global climate change becomes an impending threat. We know that we cannot drive our cars and eat our fast food and shop at cheap super-centers without it impacting someone else somewhere else. It is therefore all the more imperative as faithful peacemakers that we take seriously a reclaiming and reintegrating of the Feminine Divine in our conception and lived experiences of the Divine.
I would like to suggest three key ways in which this reintegration of the Feminine Divine helps us in our efforts to build shalom. I propose that the Feminine Divine is integral in bringing about peace with the Earth, peace with our bodies, and peace within the unjust systems of hierarchy and power.
First, the Feminine Divine, as not just Creating Spirit but also the Sustaining Spirit, is integral in our peacemaking with the Earth. As the sex whose bodies have a particular role in giving and nurturing life, women have traditionally been linked with the Earth. Recognizing the Feminine Divine as that of the Divine which is connected to Earth, not just as a Creator from up above but as the “life force that livens and sustains” Earth, is integral in transforming the way that humans have thought and acted towards Earth. The destruction of forests, polluting of waters and air, raping of the land, and diminishing of animal species is not disconnected from the lack of a Feminine Divine in our image of God, the lack of a Divine who is both bigger and beyond this very Earth but very much a part of it, a Divine who is also found within creation, the ordinary which is also sacred.
Feminist and ecological theologian Sallie McFague offers us a particular approach to the current ecological crisis (and I’ll add theological) through which she encourages us to look at everything through the model of the universe/world as God’s body. She asks, if we view all of creation as God’s body, how does that change the ways in which we interact with creation? Her model is about radical embodiment – it is not just about God having a body or being embodied, but rather, what is bedrock for the universe – matter, from which everything is made – should be applied to God as well. To put this model simply, bodies matter – all bodies. Taking on this understanding is a necessary step in transforming the broken relationship between humans and the environment. Furthermore, the body model seeks to transform human relations with all forms of life. In this model the body becomes the commonality among all life forms – coming to view all that is composed of matter as being body – humans, plants, trees, the universe. The body is what connects us all.
What does it mean to apply this model to God as well? Furthering this application, McFague suggest that this model allows us to see God as the “embodied spirit of all that is.” In this body model, God, whom Christian theology has traditionally pushed out of the world and into another space, is the “source, power, and goal – the spirit – that enlivens (and loves) the entire process and its material forms.” God is preeminent or primary spirit of the universe, the “animating, living spirit that produces, guides and saves all that is.” We are able to think of God as both immanent in our world while magnifying God’s transcendence at the same time.
McFague reminds us of what has traditionally been used to represent God. She says,
Traditionally, it has been males and their roles (fathers, kings, governors, masters), the human mind (intelligence, purpose, intention), and the human heart (love, compassion, sacrifice) that have been esteemed as a result of their function as divine metaphors. As long as we refuse to imagine God as embodied, we imply (as we do when we refuse to allow the female to serve as a metaphor of God) that the body is inferior. We imply that bodies, because of how “our world” is constructed, do not merit divine validation. But in “another world,” in another construction of reality, one that took the ecological context as the primary one, the body would be an appropriate model of God.
In addition to building peace between humans and the earth, McFague’s body model is central to my second suggestion for peacemaking with the Feminine Divine: peace with our bodies. In coming to view all of Creation as sacred and in viewing all of Creation as interconnected through our embodied status, it does not seem right to allow such negative, degrading, and diminishing accounts of the body to persist as they have for centuries in our society and church. We have conditioned ourselves to separate the mind and body as if the mind or spirit were our true selves of which the body is merely a shell, something to be controlled and suppressed. We have learned to distance ourselves from our bodies – and from other bodies – valuing ways of knowing and being in the world that are situated in reason, in abstract logic and objectivity. We have stopped listening to our bodies and to the ways of knowing and being that embodiment calls forth.
McFague speaks of this brokenness of the body,
The ambivalence and at times abhorrence that we see in Christianity, feminism, and ecology in regard to the body – in all its manifestations – indicates a deep sickness in our culture: self-hatred. To the extent we do not like our bodies, we do not like ourselves. Whatever more or other we may be, we are bodies, made of the same stuff as all other life-forms on this planet, including our brains, which are on a chemical continuum with our physical being. We do not have bodies, as we like to suppose, distancing ourselves from them as one does from an inferior, a servant, who works for us (the “us” being the mind that inhabits the body but does not really belong there). We are bodies, “body and soul”… they belong together.”
The Feminine Divine as represented in this body model of God not only brings healing and wholeness in our relationship with our own bodies but also connects us in a powerful way to other bodies that are close to us: human bodies. The holistic, well-being of bodies thus become a primary concern, as peacemakers and people of faith. This demands a significant social responsibility: how then can we overlook bodies that are hungry, thirsty, homeless, suffering, sick, raped, murdered, overworked, overlooked, imprisoned, mutilated, and the list goes on? An understanding of the Divine that works within the body model must take this into account. As McFague says, it prohibits us from spiritualizing pain. Salvation must first and foremost be about the well-being of the body.
As peacemakers, we are continually confronted with the important task of caring for bodies. How does an integration of the Feminine Divine into our perception of God change how we regard this? How does it call us to relate to other human bodies, not only those whom we are close to but also bodies in great need or bodies in opposition to us from whom we are tempted to distance ourselves? I am reminded of the words of Jesus when he said, “Whenever you care for the least of these, you are caring for me.” I do not think that Jesus is speaking here in a purely metaphorical or highly spiritual sense! But rather, Jesus, as embodied, incarnate Divine on earth, reminds us that as embodied creatures of the Divine, our bodies matter, and that to care for bodies, to regard bodies as sacred, is to respect and care for the body of Christ – divine body!
This brings me to my third suggestion for how the Feminine Divine supports our peacemaking, and that is in building peace within the systems and structures of oppression and hierarchy in our culture. A Feminine Divine who reminds us of our sacred, embodied position and of our interconnectedness with all of Creation – all of those other bodies full of life and Divine light – this Divine is also the one who empowers us towards transformation of hierarchical systems in our society and church that are gravely unjust – the oppressive structures of racism, sexism, anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism, ageism, and countless other “isms” that we seek to dissemble as peacemakers. A spirituality and faith tradition rooted in an awareness of embodiment – aware of the Feminine Divine – guides us in working for communities of equality, diversity, holism, and empowerment.
As people of faith, we recognize the strong and vital connection between the suppression of the Feminine Divine and the oppression of women, and consequently, the connection between inclusion of the Feminine Divine and the empowerment of women. The Feminine Divine as the face of God who is on the side of the oppressed is She who empowers us as peacemakers to be on the side of the oppressed, to work towards shalom and transformation and for societies where difference is embraced, justice is sought, bodies are valued, and the Earth is respected. The Feminine Divine, as an agent of integration between the pervasive mind-body dualism, propels us towards alternative ways of being and knowing, challenges us to step out of our western, white, phallogocentric constructs of objective reason and individualism, and calls us to value and learn from other cultures – sometimes more bodily, earth-centered, communal cultures. As faith-full peacemakers concerned with those whom society oppresses, those without a voice in society, our integration of the Feminine Divine compels us towards a ethic of solidarity, compassion, and change on behalf of the oppressed. The Feminine Divine reminds us of our continual connectedness to the oppressed -- that when women suffer and trees suffer and when children go hungry and when mothers and fathers die of preventable disease, that as wars persist and the earth is stripped and as people carry on in apathy – that when the body of God suffers, we all suffer. Yet, it is this very connectedness – this very interconnectedness by which we all suffer – it in is this very connectedness that we find the Feminine Divine, who is here to engage us, empower us and sustain us towards healing and peace.
In closing, I reflect on the fact that much of what I just described we as peacemakers already find ourselves involved in – seeking to transform conflict, caring for the Earth, standing up for equality, feeding the hungry. For some peacemakers, a re-integration of the Feminine Divine might not mean a radical alternation of the daily ways you live or seek to practice peace. Yet at the same time, embracing a more holistic and embodied conception and encounter of the Divine cannot help but shed radical new light on the very things we do and seek to be. Until the God that we engage as peacemakers actively and purposefully embraces the Feminine Divine, it is an incomplete God. As peacemakers who do what we do because of a faith conviction, who can only continue to do what we do because we draw our strength and hope from a Divine source, it is ever imperative that we seek a holistic, embodied being of God.
Therefore, as we seek peace with Earth, our bodies, and the systems of oppression, may we be faith-full peacemakers, ever aware of the Divine who is both beyond us and within us -- a Divine incarnate and with us -- a She who enlivens and sustains us and interconnects all that have breath and life.
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Works cited:
Kidd, Sue Monk. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995.
McFague, Sallie. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
