With Christmas near I placed her on my altar. Her coming was a different kind of nativity.
Herself as Sophia
As I had explored the ancient Goddess that autumn, I had also begun a quest for the Sacred Feminine within the Christian tradition. I was aware of feminine allusions to God in the Bible, so I began there, exploring an array of lost and suppressed feminine references.
I was especially intrigued with the phrase El Shaddai, an interesting name for God that occurs forty-eight times in the Bible. It has been traditionally translated as “the almighty” or, more exactly, “God of the mountain.” But shad is also a Hebrew word for breast. The ending ai is an old feminine ending, therefore a probable ancient meaning of El Shaddai was “the breasted one.” God, the breasted one.
There were also uncounted references to God’s compassionate, merciful, tender qualities. Rosemary Radford Ruether reminds us, “The root word for the idea of compassion or mercy in Hebrew is rechem, or womb. In ascribing these qualities to Yahweh, Hebrew thought suggested that God has maternal or ‘womblike’ qualities.”21
We’ve lost the idea of God having a womb, yet now with deep rifts exploding between cultures and races and in other groups, the recognition that all of us originate from a common womb brings forth a new vision of kinship. Suddenly we are, every one of us, close relatives.
I spent many evenings that fall recording numerous feminine references in the Bible, struck by how many of them incorporated bird imagery: God as a mother bird, caring for her young, or a mother eagle watching over her nest. Even Jesus refers to himself as a mother bird in Matthew, and later in Christianity Christ appeared in images as a mother pelican tearing at her breast in order to feed her young.
Yet it was interesting how a lot of the female imagery—and there really was a lot of it buried and camouflaged in the language—became obscured in translation. For example, in Deuteronomy 32:18 the Revised Standard Version reads, “You forgot the God who gave you birth.” But actually the words in the verse about giving birth are the Hebrew words for “writhing in labor,” which makes “giving birth” a remarkably subdued translation. Even more interesting, the Jerusalem Bible translates the verse “You forgot the God who fathered you.”
I began to wish for a thawing of the divine symbol so it could take on new life and connotations. So many of the symbols within Christianity became frozen at some point, after which they no longer allowed users to participate in the Divine in new ways.
By unfreezing the symbols, we could, for instance, draw on women’s experience and think of baptismal waters as uterine waters or approach the Eucharist through the imagery of breastfeeding to emphasize the intimacy and nurture between the Divine and her children. We could take the unique, secret-sharing, heart-to-heart epoxy bond of soul-sisters to explore the covenant of attachment between humans and Divine. The possibilities go on and on.
All in all, I found the feminine references in scripture interesting and hopeful, but I wanted to know: Is there a primary Female Ground of Being within the Jewish and Christian traditions, a Divine Feminine in whom rests the fullness of divinity? And if so, what happened to her?
This is a hard question. But as women we have a right to ask the hard questions. The only way I have ever understood, broken free, emerged, healed, forgiven, flourished, and grown powerful is by asking the hardest questions and then living into the answers through opening up to my own terror and transmuting it into creativity. I have gotten nowhere by retreating into hand-me-down sureties or resisting the tensions that truth ignited.
I knew that if I asked this hard question of Jewish and Christian traditions, I might find a complete absence of her. And if I did find there had been a Feminine Divine presence, I would still have to live with the reality that she wasn’t there now.
My search went on until the spring, days and evenings of study and questions and probing. Here’s an abbreviated and simplified account of what I found over those months.
Starting with the Hebrew tradition and the Old Testament, I found that the term for the spirit of God or Holy Spirit is a feminine term. It is the word ruah, and it occurs 378 times. Many times ruah is used to refer to the life of God or the essence through which the Divine acts. It is this transcendent spirit of God that eventually came to be known as Wisdom, referred to in Old Testament scripture by the feminine term, hokhmah. But the fascinating thing is that hokhmah or Wisdom is not merely a concept but is personified as a woman.
Over and over in the Bible and in Jewish wisdom literature. Wisdom is spoken of in Godlike ways. She’s portrayed as an entity, persona, or manifestation of God, one who was brought forth from God before creation. Preexistent with God, she participated in creating the world. She is said to order all things as well as to permeate or inspirit all things. She is referred to as a teacher, a lover, at one with trees and plants. She is the one who mediates God’s love and work in the world. She guides and reveals God’s will. For example, she is the one who guided Noah through the flood and led the children of Israel through the Red Sea.
She is said to knock inwardly at the door of the human soul or “hover outwardly” in the beauty of the natural world, awaiting acceptance. She is referred to as a tree of life and her fruit as that which satisfies. Other references to her are as the breath of the power of God, a reflection of eternal light, and one who renews all things. In Luke 7:35 Jesus implies that he and John the Baptist are Wisdom’s children.22
In the Old Testament, Wisdom says of herself:
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of old,
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When he established the heavens, I was there.
When he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master workman;
and I was daily his delight.23
Her importance is obvious. Theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has suggested that Wisdom is the God of Israel expressed in language and imagery of Goddess. C. G. Jung referred to her as “God’s self-reflection.”24 Indeed, if you highlighted all the references to her acts in the Bible, they would far exceed references to the Old Testament giants we are so familiar with—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah.
Yet we have scarcely heard of her.
When Christianity came along, Wisdom was not completely lost, though specific references to her in the New Testament are far less frequent. There she’s referred to by the Greek word Sophia.
In 1 Corinthians 1:23–24, 30, and 2:6–8, the Greek rendering of Paul’s words spells out something so remarkable it astonishes me that we’ve not recognized it more fully. The text says boldly that Sophia became the Christ. Intimations of this idea are also sprinkled elsewhere throughout the New Testament.
John’s description of Jesus as the Word or Logos corresponds in dramatic and pointed ways with descriptions of Sophia or Wisdom in the Old Testament. Biblical scholars recognize that while John 1:1–4 and other descriptive passages may not be using the name Sophia, they do seem to be referring to her. For some reason the writer substitutes the male term Logos for Sophia. But by comparing the texts, one can see that the figure being described is indeed Wisdom from Hebrew scriptures.
Logos and Sophia were perceived as interchangeable because they played the same role; both are portrayed as coexistent with God before creation, as reconciling of humanity to God, as revealing the will of God, and as God’s immanent presence in the world.
It was by now January, and the little altar in my study was becoming a sturdy presence, a place to go and remember the Divine as feminine and myself as woman, a place to encounter sacred depths and have the breath blown into my feminine sails. Herself was represented there as the Minoan Goddess; now I wanted her there as Sophia, too. I thought of a simple brass figure of Christ that I’d bought years before at a monastery gift shop. I found the Christ-figure, the Jesus-Sophi
a, and placed it on my altar.
Each time I gazed at it, I wondered why Sophia had been nearly deleted from the Christian tradition. Why the substitution of Logos for Sophia? Many Christian feminists believe it is because of the Gnostic controversy that was going on in the early churches during the time the Christian scriptures were being written.
The Gnostics were a formidable faction of Christianity that flourished the first couple of centuries after Jesus but were eventually surmounted by what came to be the orthodox Christian tradition. The Gnostics didn’t fully acknowledge Jesus’ humanity and death. They believed it was the knowledge or gnosis of Jesus’ message that saved humanity, not the crucifixion. To them he was a divine redeemer, not one who came to suffer and die.
The opposing group, the form of Christianity that came to be canonized into the New Testament, embraced Jesus’ humanity and believed it was his death that was saving. By the second century, a severe fissure had developed between the two groups.
The deletion of Sophia from Christian tradition arose because Gnostics recognized and proclaimed Jesus as Sophia. “In this historical situation proclaiming Jesus as Sophia was tantamount to accepting the Gnostic stance against Jesus’ humanity and crucifixion.”25 So naturally, the churches who came to be represented in the New Testament, not wanting to appear to align themselves with Gnosticism, referred to Sophia only in the most muted ways. It must have been an odd dilemma for them. The churches wanted and needed to recognize how important Sophia was in developing their understanding of Jesus. For as many have pointed out, it’s unlikely they could have taken the Jewish messianic figure and developed their Christology without her.26 But the churches were also forced to steer clear of Sophia directly for fear of colluding with the Gnostics.
And, too, it may be that Sophia was sidestepped for plain old patriarchal reasons, as a way of shoring up male power. Whatever it was, her absence was sealed.
Sometimes in the evenings as I sat curled up in my chair with my books, my children would ask, “What are you reading about?” and I would tell them about the feminine references to God. Their eyes would widen a little, especially Ann’s. She grew eager to hear about the things I was discovering.
One night when she asked, “What are you reading about tonight?” I told her about Sophia.
“Really?” she said.
“Really,” I told her.
She came and sat cross-legged on the floor by my chair and said, “Tell me everything about her.” And I could almost see in her face the way it affected her sense of her female self. The fears and concerns I’d had earlier about how my journey would affect my children were long gone.
I was learning that when it came to the children, I simply needed to pursue my journey in an open, quiet way. When the moment arose naturally, I mentioned my new awareness about things, but I tried never to push it onto them, to struggle to get their approval, or to insist they embrace my views. And most important, I realized I must not contaminate them with my own anger. I let them know that patriarchy and the suppression of the feminine caused me angry feelings, but I tried not to spew that emotion around or say things that would color their own religious experience. More and more I was learning that they were on spiritual journeys of their own, and I could trust them to pursue those journeys in their own ways.
Sophia, however, was not the only reference to a Sacred Feminine presence within early Christianity. Other female imagery for the divine existed, but unfortunately it, too, was located within the Gnostic Christian communities. We might never have known about it if it hadn’t been for a group of ancient manuscripts—gospels written in the fourth century—that were discovered in an earthen jar in 1945 at the base of some cliffs in Egypt. A stunning discovery, the manuscripts contained forty previously unknown works from the Christian Gnostic tradition. The texts, which had circulated as early scripture, gradually came to be attacked as early as 150 C.E. and were not accepted into the canon, or the orthodox Bible.
It wasn’t until the late sixties and early seventies that copies of the Gnostic writings became available to the West. Elaine Pagels at Princeton, one of the scholars who translated them into English, says that the main thing distinguishing the Gnostic gospels from the orthodox gospels is their abundance of powerful feminine imagery of the Divine.27
They reveal that many early Christians described and worshiped God as dyad, a being consisting of both masculine and feminine elements. They prayed to both the divine Father and the divine Mother—to Mother-Father. One of their prayers, still intact, begins, “From thee, Father, and through Thee, Mother, the two immortal names, Parents of the divine being.”28
The Gnostic gospels also referred to the Holy Spirit as female. The Secret Book of John, for example (one of the gospels that was rejected from the list of books that were to comprise the New Testament), describes a vision John had after the crucifixion:
As I was grieving . . . a unity in three forms appeared to me, and I marvelled: how can a unity have three forms? . . . It said to me, “John, why do you doubt . . . ? I am the One who is with you always: I am the Father; I am the Mother; I am the Son.”29
In other Gnostic books, the Gospel to the Hebrews and the Gospel of Thomas, which also were not included in the New Testament, Jesus himself speaks of “my Mother, the Spirit” and compares his earthly father, Joseph, to his divine Father of Truth and his earthly mother, Mary, to his divine Mother, the Holy Spirit.30
Later a number of Christian mystics, like Julian of Norwich, Jacob Boehme, and others, drew on the Gnostic tradition in their development of God as Divine Mother. Boehme particularly recovered the idea of Sophia as the female aspect who existed with the masculine God before creation.
All of this material suggested to me that in the scriptures, in the Gnostic roots of Christianity, there really did exist a concept of the Feminine Divine. But it was also true, as Rosemary Radford Ruether pointed out, that while the Goddess was behind the image of Sophia or Wisdom, in Hebrew thought she never became a fully autonomous, divine female manifestation but rather remained a dependent expression or attribute of God.31
Still, it heartened me that something of her was there in the early fabric of Christianity, even if most of her threads had been obscured or torn away. Recovering the Sacred Feminine is not completely foreign to and outside of Christianity but is in some way a fulfillment of its original potential and intent.
The summer before, while visiting Meinrad Craighead in New Mexico, she’d shown us some of the paintings that were going to be included in a new book of her art. I recalled the one portraying Wisdom—the woman in a red-hooded cloak flanked by two owls—entitled Hagia Sophia. At her belly was the divine womb, pictured as a labyrinth.
The image had lingered in me. Now as winter deepened and I continued my study of Sophia, I had a dream:
I am walking into the basilica of an old church where it seems I’ve been many times before. But looking up, I am awed to find it now holds the vast image of Sophia painted across the ceiling in brilliant colors, the same image that had been in Meinrad’s painting Hagia Sophia.
I knew then a remarkable thing was happening in me. Brightly hued feminine images were emerging; they were being painted across the old “church spaces” inside.
THE SYMBOL FUNCTIONS
As I grounded myself in Divine Feminine imagery, it had an unforeseen, yeastlike impact on my consciousness. Elizabeth A. Johnson expresses the dynamic succinctly: “The symbol of God functions.” By this she means that the symbol gives rise to ways of thought and patterns of behavior. The core symbols we use for God represent what we take to be the highest good. They become “the ultimate point of reference for understanding experience, life and the world.”32 These symbols or images shape our worldview, our ethical system, and our social practice—how we live and relate to one another.
For instance, Johnson suggests that if a religion speaks about God as warrior, using militaristic language such as how “he crushes his enemies” and summon
ing people to become soldiers in God’s army, then the people tend to become militaristic and aggressive.
Likewise, if the key symbol of God is that of a male king (without any balancing feminine imagery), we become a culture that values and enthrones men and masculinity.
I had spent nine months immersed in Divine Feminine symbols. As spring approached I was riveted by a question: What will Divine Feminine symbols create among us when integrated into the symbology we now have? What new ways of thinking, living, and acting will emerge?
THE DAWN OF FEMININE SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS
March, month of sweeping wind and spring’s slow coming. One day I worked in the backyard garden, planting three young cedar trees. I dug three holes in the earth, tucked the cedars inside, and patted the dirt around them. Along with the oaks, pines, tea olive, and azalea already growing, the cedars helped form an irregular circle. A circle of trees.
I dragged the hose over, watered the new trees, then sat down to rest. Coins of light moved under the branches where a few late crocuses protruded. Earlier I’d placed a white stone the size of a pumpkin in the middle of the trees and hung wind chimes from the limbs. Now that the “circle of trees” was taking shape here in my backyard, I felt I was bringing the journey home to the ordinary dimensions of my life, rooting it in the place I lived every day.
I lay back on the earth and looked up through the branches of an oak, feeling suddenly like the sun was my own heart pulsing up there with light. Wind swirled, and it seemed to me it was my own breath billowing through the branches. The crocus bulbs were buried in my tissue, the cedars growing from my body. The birds flew inside me. Stones sat along my bones.
It was a jubilant, stunning loss of boundary, a deeper sense of oneness than I’d ever felt. I knew myself not separate from anything. I knew that I was part of one vast, universal quilt, as one writer says, “a kind of invisible quilt that has creation stitched into it.”33 I knew that this quilt was itself, the Holy Thing, the manifestation of the Divine One. And I loved this universal quilt, every stitch, color, and fiber, with a heartbreaking love.