Be Kind to God Week

Once a year the little Methodist college I attended used to have what was called “Religious Emphasis Week”, which some of us more cynical students referred to as “be kind to God week”. With some reluctance, we went to chapel religiously for a whole week. I’m not sure how much God may have appreciated our perfect attendance.

Seems like there’s a month or a day for everything under the sun. April brought us Earth Day and Arbor Day. Memorial Day and Labor Day are called the “bookends of the summer”. Just this week Congress officially made Juneteenth a national holiday. Having already celebrated Mothers Day back in May, today happens to be the day to pay homage to all the dads, as if we should be nice to our parents at least annually if not perennially as the fifth commandment so nobly suggests.

Which brings us to the subject of gender and our current critical gender theory [CGT] with regard to God in particular. When I was being carefully taught about how I should believe, God was always referred to in masculine terms. The proper pronoun was always “He” or “Him” or “His” with a capital “h” to differentiate Him from mortal men. All of this stuff started coming unglued for me during one of my several mid-life crises and affected my role as minister for years to come.

The essence of this struggle with spiritual and gender undertones is summarized by Billy Bigelow’s soliloquy in the great musical Carousel. After singing about how he would be a proud father to a his very own son Bill, he insists… “I will see that he’s named after me…”, he pauses and thinks out loud…”Wait a minute! Could it be? What the hell! What if he is a girl?…You can have fun with a son, but you gotta be a father to a girl.”

When it finally dawned on me that all the stories of our faith were mostly written by a bunch of single guys, no wonder their god was pictured as not only an old white man with a beard, but as “Our Father, who art in heaven…” So, like Billy Bigelow, I began to wonder what if He is a She? For better or worse, I began to consider the ultimate option: does it really matter, one way or the other? Even though this flew in the face of everything I had been taught, it enabled me to perceive God quite freely and to finally be kind to God without perfect attendance.

Because I really liked my job as a minister, I did not flaunt my discovery of God’s gender issues. However, I encountered several sticky points in dealing with the grammar of faith. Throughout scripture and creeds and hymns, God is always referred to as he, him and his. And a father figure. Over time, I figured out how to maneuver through those language minefields and began using inclusive language almost imperceptibly by changing all those pronouns to just God.

Once you work through this, you become accustomed to the God who is not limited by genders or ethnicities. You are more at home with Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”. When you are free from trying to force God into all the images that have been created by humankind over the centuries, especially through the critical gender theory, your relationship with the Divine eases into an instinctive one that becomes second nature. Like being in sync with Mother Nature herself, who today is pulling off another summer solstice without so much as a by your leave.