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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 3, 2013
When you think of God as female, how does that change thoughts and feelings about God? When you think of God as a huntress, what kind of stories does that evoke? How would people, animals and the planet be affected by this picture of God?
The highest wisdom of the world tells us that there is no accurate or complete way to talk about God, however you define or think about the concept of God. “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao,” says Lao Tse. If you can describe the Mystery, you know you haven’t grasped it. This does not prevent there being many things to say about the One, the Mystery, the Force. In many cultures, even though the wise mystics at the top of the mountain of most faith traditions assure everyone that It is One, people describe Its facets as if they were separate gods. There is the king of all gods, but then again there is the king’s mother. There is the thunder god, the goddess who dwells by the sacred springs of water that come up through the earth to green the land and sustain the creatures. There is the god of creation and destruction, the goddess of love, the god of the rivers, the goddess of the crossroads, in whose cauldron all eventually go to die and emerge transformed. Some would call these spirits, others still call them gods, you might call them archetypes.
What I want to ask you to consider this morning is how a culture’s way of speaking about the Divine might shape its behavior, its sense of itself, its governance and the paradigms within which it understands humans and animals relationship with one another and with the Divinity, what is important, what is expected.
The view of God most people in the US have grown up with is a male god. He is spoken about in many metaphors in the Jewish and Christian scriptures: God of the mountains, El Shaddai, which might also mean “the breasted one.” He is the whirlwind, the warrior, the mother hen (I have heard preachers on the radio say “God is like a hen taking his chicks under his wings. I’m guessing that guy didn’t grow up on a farm.) The images most often used in our culture, though, are God the king, God the judge, and Jesus (God) the kind shepherd.
If your god is a king of everything, and he exists outside of you, your relationship to him is as a subject or as a rebel. Those are your main choices. Your concern is for what might please him. To displease the king brings bad luck and trouble. You must keep the king happy with you and yours. I’ve noticed, though, that the god who lives outside you also lives inside you. This seems to occur whether your relationship with this God you picture is as a believer, or if you are a faithful non-believer in this image of God. If this god lives in you as a part of you, you feel called always to be in control, and if people and events don’t go your way, you rain down consequences . Your question is “Am I pleased? Is everyone doing what I want them to do? If not, am I grieved? What am I going to do about it?”
If your god is a judge, and he exists outside of you, your primary relationship is as the one being judged. Your concern must be for the laws, and how to keep them in a way that makes the judgment come out in your favor. You can argue and you can appeal, you can have reasons and excuses, but you are always being evaluated. If this god is part of you, then you might always be evaluating, always judging “is this good or bad, right or wrong.”
If you think about god as a shepherd, your primary relationship to him is as part of his flock. You follow him. You don’t go off on your own or he comes to gently bring you back to the herd. His job is to fight off the bad things, and your job is to stay close by. You’re either a good lamb or a lost lamb. Those are your choices. He doesn’t need your help.
Our poet with the yellow beret bought one of the auction items in the fall, the one that enabled him to invite me to preach about a particular topic of his choosing. He chose “God the Huntress.”
I remember in seminary being introduced to feminist theology. The feminine face of God. I was steeped in Protestant culture, so my first thoughts were along the lines of : How do you imagine the king and the judge as female? Would she rule more compassionately? No one who knows history would say yes to that. Would she understand women better? Probably. My classmates and I spent time re-imagining God, having discussions about how different it felt to have the king and judge more womanly, even motherly. Thoughts about God the Mother varied with our individual experiences of our own mothers. She seemed more understanding to some, less powerful to others. Then thealogian (spelled this way to indicate the femaleness of god) Mary Daly, a wild and brilliant woman from Boston University, challenged us all. “A female god is not just Yahweh in drag,” she wrote. She was far ahead of us in lifting ourselves out of the paradigms in which we had been raised.
What if your god is a huntress? In order to be a good hunter you have to be comfortable in the wild. You have to be able to be quiet, alone, you are able to immerse yourself in the mind of the thing you are hunting. You have to be able to lose yourself, to wait, to be quick. You must be peaceful with taking life, with getting bloody.
The huntress we know the best is Diana, also called Artemis. She was one of the most important goddesses in the Mediterranean world. The Christian scriptures describe a riot in the city of Ephesus when a crowd gathered around the Apostle Paul as he was preaching and shouted him down for two hours “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!”
Her mother Leto was a consort of Zeus, so Zeus’s wife hated her. When it came time for her to deliver her twins, Hera hounded her across the globe, and there was no place on the land or sea for her to rest from her labor pains. Finally, a swampy and unstable mix of land and sea firmed up in order to allow her to give birth. Swans surrounded her. Artemis was born first, painlessly, it is said. She helped her mother deliver her twin brother Apollo, whose birth, by contrast, took nine days and nights. She was the moon, and Apollo the sun. Artemis/Diana is portrayed as a young woman, a virgin. What that meant in the ancient world was that she belonged to herself. The woods were sacred to her, and you disturbed her trees at your peril. In some places, in ancient times, it was in her woods that the contest between the current king and his challenger was held. Her voice, her power decided who would rule. The animals were sacred to her, especially the deer. Some stories have her traveling with a pack of dogs, and some with a pack of maidens. Diana does not say yes when she means no. She is not sweet. She is not accommodating. She is fierce about her body’s unassailability. When she caught a young man watching her bathe one afternoon, the faith story says that she turned him into a stag and confused his pack of dogs so that they tore him to pieces before he could go brag to his mates about having seen her naked.
If your god is a huntress, and she is outside of you, you are her helper or her prey, or she is your protector. What is she hunting? If it’s food, she’s showing you a way to feed your family, a way to take a life without displeasing her. If she is hunting you, she’s waiting for you patiently, she knows your mind, she sees you clearly, and she will take you completely. If she is hunting truth, she will track it inexorably. She glimpses it in all its forms, and she draws in its scent until that is all she is aware of. If she is within you, as I imagine all the gods you attend to are, she is that part of you that belongs to yourself, that is inviolate, the part of you that protects you, the part that can hide and wait and listen to the leaves rustle as what you seek moves ahead of you. She is a still point inside you, saying yes when she means yes and no when she means no.
We are in the Unitarian Universalist tradition here, and our forbear Ralph Waldo Emerson said “a person will worship something.” Whatever it is that guides you, whatever it is you steer by, that shapes you. To some degree you have a choice in the way you picture God, or the Divine, or the spirits or the Mystery. You choose what to believe and how, and it’s okay to try on different ideas. If Diana is the one you choose to explore, happy hunting!
Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.
http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776
