Where Is the Female Spirit in Our Image of God?

How female Christian mystic Hadewijch and Love itself can help us reclaim a holistic vision of God.

“In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God, Mother of us all.”— common benediction regarding the “triune” God in inclusive Christian churches.

“So God created human beings. In the image of God (God) created them. (God) created them male and female.”— Genesis 1:27, EXB translation.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” — Galatians 3:28, NKJV translation.

“"In our time we've masculinized God more than the tradition can bear. What we're trying to do is recapture the more inclusive view of God, correct mistakes that translators made. It's idolatry to make God into less than God."— Laura Mol

“The Spiritually Confident Man is the giver and receiver, the “provider of the feast.” His opposite is the Patriarchal Man, the taker, the “ruler on the throne.”— Zeus Yiamouyiannis, p. 144 of The Spiritually Confident Man.

***

Far before modern secular inclusion language, there has been, throughout history, an inspired effort to express a fuller nature of God which captures and integrates the feminine and masculine aspects of human beings. All the world’s major religions have been masculinized— Hindu, Buddhist, Judaic, Muslim, and Christian— of this there can be no doubt. But what would a God look like that embraces male and female and, indeed, goes beyond them? To what can we appeal to fruitfully inform this effort?

After asking myself this question and searching high and low, I found a source both learned and inspired— Hadewijch, a female 13th century mystic and poet as translated and introduced by Mother Columba Hart. Hadewijch emerges from the Beguine community of lay women devoted to God, primarily in the 12th through 16th centuries, who constitute some of the purest understandings of God and love (in the form of “love mysticism”, AND some of the greatest challenges to the “ruler on the throne” patriarchal hierarchies of the Catholic Church. These inspired Beguine women threw down a very provocative gauntlet: If God is Love, and Divine Love is the direct and universal language of God, then what need ultimately does one have of churches?

At the heart of beguine mysticism, says (Laura) Swan (author of The Wisdom of the Beguines), was a special devotion to Christ as lover and sufferer. The triune God, wrote one beguine, was Lover, Beloved, and Love itself.

Feminine-tinged desire, joining, ecstasy, celebration, grace, and love firmly confronted rigid norms within male-dominated religious hierarchies of all types. These hierarchies tended to uphold and reinforce the OPPOSITE of yielding to love, in the form of: discipline, original sin, damnation, flagellation, institutional piety, fear, and power. No wonder these women became popular and competed successfully for religious donations with local parish churches! Who wouldn’t prefer the former? And indeed who was closer to the true words of a gospel Christ centered on Love rather than fear? Who was closer to “Love thy enemy,” the three most radical words ever uttered in religious history? It is no surprise that some notable Beguines were burned at the stake, including Marguerite Porete for advocating a personal and liberatory gospel of love and challenging the grim grip of institutional religious authority. That was so unbecomingly Christ-like of her! She must be eliminated!

Perhaps no person better laid out this “love mysticism” than Hadewijch. In the preface to her “Complete Works”, Paul Mommaers points to passages that can be best described as radical, ground-breaking, and transformative in their implications.

Love’s soft stillness is unheard of
However loud the noise she makes
Except by him who has experienced it
And whom she has wholly allured to herself
And has so stirred with her deep touch
That he feels himself wholly in Love
When she also fills him with the wondrous taste of Love
The great noise ceases for a time,
Alas! Soon awakens Desire, who wakes
With heavy storm the mind that has turned inward.
(P. 25, st.4)

If it is, as Mommaers interprets of this passage (Preface, p. xvii), that “God is too great for man” in a way that humans can neither fully possess nor BE possessed by God, a great humility and longing burst forth. No church or church official, or even saint, no matter how high, virtuous, or learned could attain by him or herself full unity with God. This abstract completion is an aspect of the limited intellect and conception. Only unlimited Love herself, as a gift of the spirit, can bring one in to connection. Desire to know and merge with God intimately (female) is mixed with reason (male) “which throws light on the lasting transcendency of God… (through which) the mystic learns to love (God) in (God’s) independence and wholly-being Other.”

In other words, a feminine-tinged divine love becomes the bridge between the rationally unbridgeable gulfs between man, woman, and God. Former “I-It” objects become “I-Thou” spiritual relationships (to use the terms of philosopher Martin Buber) through love and love alone. The distinction remains. We must accept each other and God (and the Trinity) as wholly INDEPENDENT and separate (in order for true love and relationship to emerge instead of a mere projection of our own identity), but at the SAME TIME wholly interdependent and connected at the level of deep mutual immersive desire shared by lover and beloved, beloved and lover. We are both One (feminine merging) and multifold Other (masculine independence) at the same time!

“For God so loved the world.”

That’s heady stuff. But what does this look like in practical terms? What does it mean that “an actual being-one with God is now taken up by Love herself” (Mommaers, xvii)?

Hadwijch:

Sometimes indulgent and sometimes harsh,
Sometimes dark and sometimes bright
In liberating consolation, in coercive fear
In acceptance and giving
Must they who are
Knight-errants in Love
Always live here below (P. 5, st. 7)

We are imperfectly perfect in Love made human, errantly graced, destined to fail and succeed at the same time! By failure we are brought to grace. Opened by grace, we are inspired toward the inherent success of love. As we triumph in life with impermanent “successes” of job, romantic relationship, or faith, we know that we cannot seal those successes in any ultimate or final way. We are still missing something, still desiring “more,” which spurs us onward, outward, and deepward. We thus bring the male and female elements together in a dance of love within us, and realize this dance of male and female, of dark and light, suffering and grace, spirit and world is itself the point of life. Hopefully this creative dance extends into our wider world recovering from the ersatz masculinity called patriarchy.

Integration and balance of love (shared nature and connection) and freedom (distinctness and separation) become our new mission, one of co-creation which wins over endless toil and contention. Our hopeless desires to conquer all change, sin, and suffering through a final solution are transformed into a practice of holding our ignorance, shortcomings, and failures in the healing embrace of grace born of God’s love. This love now invites us to open our selves, our souls, and our spirits to the greater, a movement MADE POSSIBLE by the lower and more humble. Without our sin, errancy, and even stupidity, what need have we for love and God at all? As we surrender ourselves to this greater love, stupidity as well as cupidity falls away, and wisdom advances. We become the reconciled sons and daughters of God. We yet rejoin, in the ever already-and-not-yet of our own spiritual development as individual persons and as a human people.

In any aspiration and attempts toward Love and Spirit, we become more noble no matter how crass our efforts may be at times. Rather than kick ourselves for lapses, let us pick ourselves (and each other) up. Let us not regret or bewail, but learn and rejoice, for God is good, and the Spirit is alive, and Male can join Female, Sin can meet Grace, and in this dance, we are brought upward and closer to God. Even as we stumble, Love and Spirit remain our constant companions and guides.

May we love for evermore, for in love is learning, and in learning is greater closeness with each other and with God. May it be so until the appointed day when we are reunited and home again around the banquet table sharing our tales on incarnation while nourishing ourselves with the nectar of Love transcendent.

All blessings, Zeus