The Priestess and the Goddess

A couple of weeks ago while across the road having a pint after the service I mentioned my intended topic for this morning to one of our esteemed managing committee members, his immediate reaction was “oh no, I’m staying away from that one, we’re going to be bashed again, we’re going to be told that any gentle and generous parts of our nature are down to the feminine within us and any aggressive and unsympathetic characteristics are down to our masculine nature.” I hope that is not what is going to come across this morning – I have no intention of bashing men.

We went on to discuss the politically correct feminisation of language and how this “P.C.” overhaul can be accomplished, while the ethos of an organisation remains deeply prejudiced against women. In contrast, this Church welcomes any member, who is willing to put in the work, to conduct a service and share their own ideas and approaches to worship with the rest of the congregation or become involved in any other area of church life. I certainly felt welcome to do this; within a year of becoming a regular member of the congregation I had joined the lay-preachers course run by the Minister, shortly afterwards I became a member of the Managing Committee and now am in the process of applying to train as a Unitarian Minister at Manchester College Oxford, which I was pleased to learn accepted its first female candidate for the Nonconformist ministry in 1907.

Looking at all of these facts you might say, isn’t it obvious that women are held as being absolutely equal with men in the eyes of this denomination and this congregation. This is so and just as it should be and shouldn’t really be any great cause for comment. So, what am I doing devoting a sermon and a service solely to the issue of exploring the place of the priestess and the goddess in our worship.

Actually, as an aside the whole notion of a priestly caste within a spiritual community is anathema to most Unitarians who hold that each individual is equally responsible for their own spiritual quest. A Minister’s task is as a facilitator in the spiritual questing of the congregation and not as a sacramentally anointed person set apart from the rest of the community. So the title of my address is a bit of a misnomer but “The Priestess and the Goddess” just somehow had a better ring to it than “The Female Minister and the Goddess”

Back to what I’m doing devoting a service to the issue of the feminine in our worship. Many of us, by heritage, hail originally from Catholic or other spiritual communities, where it is still unheard of for women to hold any sort of roles of power. For those of us who came to Unitarianism as adults with a history behind us in other religious traditions, no matter how much we have intellectually discarded the ideas of those other religious traditions, there is no doubt that for many of us they are a deep part of our personal history. We cannot so easily slough off the things, which were part of our formation from our earliest years.

We are a product of our collective history, in which there is a broadly documented history of patriarchy within all Christian churches. However there is also a largely forgotten part of that history in which women were held in higher esteem spiritually and intellectually. In her book “The Serpent and the Goddess” Mary Condren writes, “Women had largely been written out of history but traces remained. On finding scraps of texts in The Lives of the Saints such as, ‘The women went to Saint B. to study theology’ I trembled both with delight and anger. Women had had a different past; they had studied theology; yet for hundreds of years in recent history, they no longer studied theology.”

Because our recent history has been dominated by patriarchy, women have to be pro-active in re-asserting their power within their spiritual communities – power, which can be gentle and life-affirming and not about self-aggrandisement or setting one person above another.

I think that one of the solutions to the historical omission of women’s voices from religious thought is to actively foster the use of new and older but neglected texts by and about women. However in doing so I think it is important to maintain a balance between male and female both in participation and in language.

In Lucinda Vardey’s book “The Flowering of the Soul” she identifies five ‘key virtues shared by women who pray’ virtues, which she states ‘by their very nature, are uniquely feminine’. These virtues she lists as relatedness, perceptiveness, unity, dedication and care. While I admire her book and find a lot of what she says true for me and helpful in my questing to find my own way of relating to the divine, I would be extremely wary of describing such traits as being uniquely feminine. While it may be true that more women than men in general exercise these traits, there is no doubt that there are men who are caring, perceptive etc, and I think it is unhelpful to describe them as feminine rather than masculine. Isn’t it more positive to accept human beings along a continuum with all shade of sensitivity and practicality along that continuum, appreciating the varied gifts and allowing for the varied weaknesses of all people, without reference to their gender.

However it is interesting to ask, “is there something, which I as a woman can bring to worship that Bill, our regular and wonderful minister cannot?” This question I pondered long and hard and it’s a difficult one. Is the kind of service, which I conduct inherently different from the kind of service conducted by a male minister or preacher? A few weeks ago the service was conducted by three men, the theme explored the Presbyterian roots of our denomination in a very factual way. This was very interesting and I think it’s important that we spend time considering the history, which has shaped the liberal religion, which we enjoy today. However, I can’t see myself delivering a service of that type very often. I suppose I am more interested in what motivates individuals rather than in broad historical movements and maybe that is a feminine rather than a masculine approach. Is my approach of value because I can allow myself to be less intellectual and more emotional? I don’t know the answer to these questions it’s all just part of the exploration which we take part in together.

The original impetus to write this address came when listening to Bill’s two addresses entitled “Honouring the Gods”. I don’t want to take issue with the ideas, which Bill talked about in these services but the very title gave me pause for thought. Why honouring the Gods and not the Goddesses? As Bill stated “both the Jewish and the Christian Gods are male – at least in our psyche we perceive them as male”. There is no doubt about this. The God of the Christian faith to which the Unitarian movement is still aligned, in the minds of many of its members, is male. How can we reconcile this with being a liberal religion committed to inclusivity?

God does not have a gender and although we can readily accept that intellectually, we should be aware that many of us have a deep history of the use of male-centred language in prayer and that it is embedded in our collective psyche. The word God, in itself, causes me problems, it is a word, which despite our modern sophistication and political correctness can’t but conjure up images of a male godhead for many of us. How can we escape from these deeply ingrained images of a male godhead?

There are some that reject the use of anthropomorphic imagery of god at all and I am certainly not suggesting an acceptance of God as actually being male or female, however the notion of God is so completely beyond the ability of our intellects and language to grasp that sometimes the only way to approach God is through imagery. We could use completely gender-neutral language all of the time but this can leave God in the realm of an indescribable concept and as cold and unapproachable. For many of us, in order to approach God in our very human and imperfect way the use of some kind of imagery is helpful, so long as there is an acceptance that this use of imagery is simply a device by which we can use language to try to describe a concept, which is beyond language.

I am not comfortable with meddling with the language of our traditional prayers and hymns in a lot of cases. For example, I am deeply attached to Psalm 23 – “The Lord is my Shepard” it’s part of my history and I find it deeply comforting and strengthening in times of fear or uncertainty. In principal I have no problem with male imagery of God but it has to be balanced with an equally powerful imagery of God as female.

My aunt was an active member of an ashram in London for many years, I haven’t talked to her in great depth about the particular beliefs of the ashram but having distanced herself from the institutions of this community she still uses the spiritual practices which she learned there including prayer and meditation. I was very struck by the fact that in times of uncertainty or petition she makes offering of flowers and incense to the Goddess, I’m not sure which Goddess in the Indian pantheon or if she makes offering to more than one but this is not important. What is important is the experience that as a woman and as a mother she can come to the Goddess and relate to the Goddess about the deepest things in her life, which she probably could not do in the same way to a male image God. This is an experiential and not an intellectual exercise.

I want to share with you some of her own words about her experience the Goddess – she wrote:

“I really believe nothing
Except that belief is not required.
Only experience counts.

So after the incense
And the little gift of flowers
Somehow I notice, I experience,
Deep, far away, like a glimmer within,
A tiny sense of having come home.
I do experience this.
Fortunately, I have no need to account for it.”

More and more the experiential aspect of spirituality is of greater importance to be than the intellectual aspect and any methods I can find which help me to deepen that experience I hold to be of value. For me, at the place where I am on my spiritual path right now, using female imagery is helping to deepen my exploration and I commend it to you as a small stepping-stone along the path towards spiritual depth.

Our congregation benefits from a coming together of male and female, practical and spiritual. Today I have presented a service centred on an image of God as feminine, as a Mother, probably next week you will probably hear something completely different and this is our strength.

Maud Robinson