God, the Feminine

It is a constant battle, this assault on the feminine by the masculine. Not even C. S. Lewis, that cheerful hedonistic Christian who helped husband discover Christ, is immune from doing it. Compared to God, he says at one point, all else is feminine. That is, God is out to overwhelm, take over, all else.

Husband shakes his head, almost dizzy with the image. Is that the God he knows? No. Is that a God that a rape victim could understand? No. Is that the God a broken heart such as feminist Andrea Dworkin would hate? Yes.

He ponders, and ponders quite a while, since he's saddled with a second-rate intellect that has far more questions than answers, and with a personality overtly siding with the existential rather than the abstract logic favored by other pseudo-intellectuals he knows.

God and his wife. God and her heart. God and the heart of other women husband knows.

Why does God hide? Why doesn't God just plunge down on creation like a tidal wave, like a giant muscled arm with a fist on the end of it? Why doesn't he force us to love him?

God is coy. God flirts with us, showing a little leg, then vanishing just as we're getting really interested. God falls back at the least resistance. God doesn't like guys that flex their muscles, act arrogant, and strut around like they know everything. He loves those who come to him and honestly talk about all their hopes, desires, failures.

God nurtures us like a mother nurses a newborn. God births us a second time. God continually offers hospitality, a bounty-filled dinner table for any who would allow him entrance.

No, God hides because God made not only male in his image but female in his image as well. He is more masculine than any male human will ever be... yet he is more feminine than any woman. He is not sexed; he has no genitals. (Husband's lip wrinkles in faint disgust at the thought.) But he does know the human body, male and female, through creation. He knows what humanity feels like as well, having been fully human in Christ.

So, wasn't Christ male? Doesn't that mean God is masculine? Husband smiles almost bitterly, remembering Fredrich Neitszche's words about Christ and Christianity: a woman's religion, a religion of slaves and women, founded by a God who weakened himself by becoming man, then weakened himself and his followers by cultivating a sense of pity. No, Jesus was not masculine in any modern western / American version of masculinity. Yet he was masculine beyond any other man, filled with the perfect strength and power of divine love. He was feminine beyond even the women around him, filled with an empathy and compassion so deep that even as he went to resurrect the dead Lazarus, he wept. Pity? Oh, yes.

He reads daily news, an article cleverly titled for Father's Day: "Our Father is no 'It' or Gal God." He sighs. Yes, God is called "Father" in the Scriptures, and as someone with a high view of those writings, he doesn't argue with the designation. But this writer is anything but convincing, laying out argument after argument than only underscore the usual disconnect for most Christian men regarding their own blindness. Husband found himself almost wanting to spit it out. "I don't need your crappy phallic deity with his love of the rigid rule and complete disconnect from the poor and oppressed!" Husband trembles inwardly at the force of these feelings.

He thinks back to before he was a believer, how God pursued him, but how gentle, how feminine, God was in that pursuit. At the time he was angry with God, daring God to appear, trying to force God into revealing himself, blaspheming God in attempts to draw God's wrath down on him. "Let's see the male deity, at least I'll know before he kills me that he exists."

But God, the God of the Universe, shrank back like a shy girl at a dance. Alluring, inviting, just out of reach. And when his rebel heart at last smashed itself against the end of itself, the end of meaning that he felt as surely as one might feel a wall, then God revealed Himself. First as masculine, as other, as holy and wholly demanding. Yet not even then forcing, except to force the decision. And the young man ran, literally, away to hide under his blankets.

God the feminine / masculine came to him at last on a farmhouse floor as he knelt in quiet, hopeless desperation. First the emptiness, the passively open heart he held upward. Then the downward sweep that penetrated him to the quick, altered all in an instant. And his astonished, overwhelmed response, thrusting hands upward toward the feminine to in turn penetrate God. The two of them, interpenetrated, intimate.

Oh, yes. Say the masculine God penetrates, and the feminine human heart is penetrated. But that is not the whole truth. The human heart needs to penetrate God, and God welcomes that penetration. He is all strength, power, and might. Yet he wants to be known just as the bride wants her body known by her groom. Does not the groom want to be penetrated? I don't speak of genitals here, but of hearts. Doesn't he want to feel his wife's tenderness actively embrace, surround, and possess him? Isn't this the core of mutual love, the one giving to the other the embrace, the gift? And who is to say where "masculine" and "feminine" begin and end in such matters?

Husband sighs, wondering not for the first time why he is so beset by all this. But he thinks of his wife's body, her heart, her desire for him, and her tears as she worships Christ. She acts. Is that masculine? Is to be feminine always to be the acted upon? If so, then Christ was the ultimate feminine.

He was penetrated by nails, by a spear, and by all the sins of the world. As God, he allowed this penetration to take place. It was the rape of God.

That suffering, and overcoming God, is the God I worship, husband says to himself. There can be no other God than that God. He revealed himself after his resurrection to the women first. Before that gladness, when the hopes of all Jesus' disciples were darkened, the women were more masculine (that is "brave" and "active") than were the male disciples. It was they who came to Golgotha to be with him in his suffering. And looking at his mother, he gave his last command before dying to the lone man among them who also seemed feminine, John, the beloved disciple (the one not afraid to lay his head upon Jesus' breast). "Here is your mother."

God yields to us. He lets us have our way. He suffers indignity and persecution because of us, for us, in spite of our deadly apathy.

God is masculine, yes. And God is feminine.

[This posting originally appeared on my Highromance blog, and you may want to go there to see comments made, and to add your own, though here is okay if you desire.]