The kids at Flame asked an interesting question last
Thursday: is God a boy or a girl? Me and Sara just looked at each other like
uuuuhhhhhh... Their parents were arriving in the foyer and we were about to
finish with a little prayer, but I wish we’d had the time to discuss it because
it showed that they were starting to think of God as a person, rather than just
an idea or a genie.
Then I thought that perhaps other people wonder about this
too. So here’s a bit of a thought dump on the subject.
The first three things I wanna say are that:
1) As far as I know
God isn’t male or female, God has
both male and female characteristics.
2) Even though God is ‘genderless’, for
want of a better word, we don’t call Him ‘it’ because ‘it’ is generally used
when referring to inanimate objects and animals and we mustn’t forget that God
is a person.
3) I refer to God as ‘He’, not because I’m a raging misogynist, but
simply because it’s how I’ve referred to Him all my life.
I guess the reason God has characteristics of both genders,
and is simultaneously both and neither, is that gender only really came about
when He made humans and animals (and plants if you wanna get technical).
So why did God even bother with the whole gender thing? It really seems to have been more trouble than it’s worth. Let’s start in the
beginning. On the 6th day God made Man i.e. the first human (see my
previous post ‘Feminism and the Fall’ where I bang on about how the first human
was split in half like an amoeba).
Right now I feel the answer can be explained, at least a
little bit, by the Trinity. This is the idea that God is at once one God, and three
separate people: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Please do not try too
hard to understand this. There are
plenty of helpful analogies (e.g. the cloverleaf), but at the end of the day God is just too big and complex for
us to get our heads around. He’s three, and he’s one.
So before God created the world there was just the Father
and the Son and the Holy Spirit loving one another in perfect community. Is
it surprising that when they create the first human they say “Its not good for
humans to be alone”? And thus the first human is divided in two: man and woman.
So that these two can love each other like the Father, Son and Holy Spirit love
each other.
Even now, after all the good relationships God planned for
us went wrong (between each other and with Him) we can still search for that
love that exists within the Trinity: romantic love, family love, friendship love. That’s why when we make time for each
other, or we put somebody else's needs before our own, we bring a little piece
of heaven to earth.
Sorry, got a bit side tracked there. But I would have liked
to tell the kids at Flame about the Trinity if I’d had time.
I’d like to tell them that
the names Father and Son don’t necessarily mean a masculine God but one who wants
to be like a parent to us. That He became one of us in the
form of Jesus and knows exactly how much we suffer. I’d like to tell them that some people have considered the Holy Spirit to be the feminine facet of God as She is
associated with healing and wisdom. And probably because She’s the part of God that is
everywhere in the world at once (that was a joke… sort of).
But I imagine they would find it all very boring. And on that note, I think I'll finish.
I realise that this is kind of a random collection of thoughts
rather than anything coherent but please share any comments/ideas/questions as always, because sometime I spend too much time in my own head and need to hear some other voices :)
