Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose.

I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.

Welcome to this episode.

We've got a slightly different kind of episode this time.

I have mentioned once or twice that I recently wrote and published a book called Finding God's Feminine Side.

And my editor and I have been working on creating an audio version of that, and we thought that maybe you would quite enjoy listening to a bit of it.

So that's what we're going to have this time.

If you get to the end of this and you think, actually I would really like to read the book now, never fear, it's available on Amazon in both a paperback and a Kindle version, and I will make sure that there are links to that in the show notes.

So without further ado, here is your sample of Finding God's Feminine Side, the audio book.

You might be surprised to discover that one of the names for God in the Hebrew Bible, El Shaddai, means the Lord, the Breasted One.

This might come as a bit of a shock.

After all, El Shaddai, the God with boobs, never makes the cup when someone is designing a names of God tea towel or mug.

It's sometimes translated as God Almighty.

But that makes sense of neither its Hebrew root, Shaddai comes from the Hebrew word shad, meaning breast, nor its context.

It nearly always appears in connection with children and fertility.

Here is a whistle-stop tour of where we find El Shaddai.

In Genesis 17, El Shaddai promises Abraham countless descendants.

In Genesis 28, Isaac asks El Shaddai to bless Jacob with many children.

In Genesis 35, 11, El Shaddai tells Jacob to be fruitful and multiply.

In Genesis 43, 14, Jacob asks for the blessing of El Shaddai as his sons return to Joseph with the hope of securing the safety of his son Benjamin and the safe return of Simeon from Egypt.

Later, when he is blessing Joseph, he prays, "May Shaddai bless you with the blessings of the heavens above, and the blessings of the watery depths beneath, and the blessings of the breasts and the womb."

The name also appears in Psalm 91, which talks about people sheltering under the shadow of God's wings, an image that invokes the picture of a mother bird protecting her young.

Conversely, the ill favour of Shaddai is associated with a lack of fertility in the deaths of children.

Naomi, who lost both her sons, says, "Shaddai has made life very bitter for me.

I went away full, but I have come home empty."

Joel 1.15 talks of cursing from Shaddai resulting in the failure of crops and seeds dying in the ground.

Isaiah 13, 6-8 says the terror brought by Shaddai will be like the anguish of a woman in labour.

So it would appear that El Shaddai does indeed mean the Lord, the Breasted One, and it was just that those translators who have left it out couldn't cope with the idea of a God with boobs.

In fact, El Shaddai is one of the very first names the Israelites had for God, before they were even Israelites.

We know this because in Exodus 6.23 God tells Moses, "I am Yahweh," which means "I am that I am," a name that is entirely beyond gender.

"I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not reveal my name Yahweh to them."

So God was known as the Lord, the Breasted One, before being revealed as Yahweh.

Feminine first.

So it is likely that for Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah, the default image of God was feminine.

That feminine image of God seems to have been present more widely than simply amongst the Israelites.

Shaddai is also used by Balaam when he blesses the Israelites despite Balak's request that he should curse them.

Balaam was a holy man, but not an Israelite.

In the book of Job, regarded as one of the earliest pieces of scripture to be written, the name El Shaddai or Shaddai turns up quite a lot.

Sometimes the name is connected with home and fertility in children, as in Job 29.5 where Job says, "Shaddai was still with me, and my children were around me."

And sometimes it is used more generally as a moniker for God.

Job 32.8 connects Shaddai and wisdom.

There is a spirit within the people, the breath of Shaddai within them that makes them intelligent.

Notice also that God challenges Job.

Do you still want to argue with Shaddai?

You are God's critic, but do you have the answers?

So there is a link between the feminine divine and wisdom and intelligence.

Culturally, our picture of God is generally clothed, stately and male.

The old guy on a cloud on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, reaching out towards a semi-reclined Adam.

Michelangelo, of course, was painting out of his experience of Christianity and the Church.

That iconic image perfectly encapsulates the masculine feel and culture of the Church down the centuries.

Whether it's towering cathedrals with robed clergy and choir boys, or little Methodist chapels, or big charismatic churches with preachers in shiny shoes and skinny jeans, it all carries the cultural DNA that helped shape that Sistine Chapel image of God.

It's all masculine.

Which makes it quite hard to imagine God as El Shaddai.

We would be shocked to walk into a church to find a piece of art depicting God as a breastfeeding mother.

Back in the 1980s and 90s, banner making was very much a thing.

Lots of churches, particularly charismatic ones, had groups of women who got together to make banners to display in the church.

Perhaps they still do.

I just imagine the Mother's Union at my local parish church, unveiling their latest creation to reveal not another picture of flames and doves, but God breastfeeding.

Can you imagine the uproar?

We haven't made room for God the Mother, pregnant, in labour, giving birth and breastfeeding.

These things just aren't in our cultural canon.

They are not metaphors that usually turn up in our hymns or prayers or religious art.

But they are in our Bible, and they help us to understand God in new ways.

Rebecca McLaughlin talks about the way that breastfeeding her first baby helped her to see God differently, especially at the beginning when she was nursing a newborn, and it didn't always happen easily.

Her breasts were sore, her baby needed feeding over and over again, and she was exhausted.

She writes, "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has born?

Though she may forget, I will not forget you."

God's love for us is no hallmark sentiment.

This image is not primarily a celebration of our newborn cuteness.

Rather, this verse reveals God's hard-won, self-giving, dogged commitment to our good, a refusal to let us go however frustrating we become, an insistence on seeing His image in us, and a painful provision for our most desperate need.

Yes, God loves us with all the affection of a mum for her infant.

We are His blood-bought image bearers, and He delights in us.

But breastfeeding taught me that His care is more than just affection.

When I fail and frustrate my Lord again and again, He nonetheless gets up in the night to meet my needs.

Though a desperate mother may forget, or at least give up the fight of caring for her child, He will not forget us.

"See," says the Lord, right after His breastfeeding metaphor, "I have engraved you on the palms of My hands," Isaiah 49-16.

Babies leave wounds on their mother's bodies.

We have also left wounds on Christ.

But, like a tender mother, He will never leave or forsake us.

Hebrews 13-5.

This breastfeeding metaphor also carries through into the New Testament, where the writer of the Hebrews talks about his readers needing spiritual milk.

Hebrews 5, and where Peter encourages his readers, "Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good."

(1 Peter 2, 2-3) For years, I abstracted that verse away from the very obvious motherly imagery that it contains, to just hearing it as an instruction to read my Bible more, to absorb the correct doctrine.

That's probably because in my formative years as a Christian, I listened to many sermons where that was the emphasis.

But where are you going to get spiritual milk and taste that the Lord is good, if not at God's breast, in God's patient embrace?

I have to admit that, as beautiful as this imagery is, I don't find it comfortable.

I've spent far too long in an English masculinized church to easily incorporate into my prayer life the idea of enthusiastically suckling at God's breast like a hungry baby.

For most of my life, these images have been entirely missing.

I have lived many decades in a society where breastfeeding in public is largely taboo, and most church-going nursing mothers would be far more likely to find a quiet spot out the back than feed their babies during a service.

I can't help wishing that my imaginary taboo-busting Mother's Union group had made their controversial banner after all, and that, just occasionally, the Virgin Mary posed for a statue when Jesus needed feeding.

Having said that, verses like these are opening a window in my soul and letting in some air, as I dare to believe that my female self is created in the image of God, that God chooses to be known in the imagery of the womb and breasts and births.

In a world where religion so often demands of women that they hide not only their breasts, but also their hair, their bodies, and sometimes even their faces, as if the physical female form were somehow profane or carnal, we have God expressing our relationship with the divine using visceral metaphors of birth and breasts and womb.

It's passionate.

It's the stuff of earth and guts and blood and love.

As Christians, we are used to the idea of incarnation, of God identifying with us, God turning up human form in the person of Jesus with us at every stage of life, and finally dying, bleeding and naked on a Roman cross.

So we should not be surprised that the Hebrew scripture shows us God as a woman, pregnant, giving birth, nursing mother.

This gutsy, earthy God is a far cry from the sanitized, often quite intellectualized images of God that we are used to.

The Spirit.

I became a Christian within the charismatic tradition, where much store was set on the experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit.

This was seen in my church as something to seek after and desire.

Apparently the right order to do things was to be baptized and then pray to be filled with the Spirit.

So the evening that I was baptized, aged 18, I was ushered to an upper room where the elders and pastors of the church, all men, all older than me by at least a couple of decades, sat me down, stood around me and laid hands on me.

The whole experience was deeply intimidating and very male.

I was terrified.

I thought God was going to do something intimidating and scary and that I was honor bound to let him.

"You do not need to be afraid of the Holy Spirit," they reassured me, "because the Holy Spirit is a gentleman."

Unsurprisingly, this wasn't reassuring at all.

Though I'm sure that she was there, I was far too intimidated to be open to any kind of spiritual encounter.

I felt nothing when they prayed for me and left that room feeling very inadequate.

Most English translations use the pronoun 'he' to refer to the Spirit, which is fitting for a gentleman.

But if you go back to the Greek and Hebrew texts, the masculinity of the Spirit almost completely disappears.

New Testament Greek has three grammatical genders, neuter, feminine and masculine, with the word for Spirit, 'nouma', being neuter.

So in Greek, the pronouns used for Spirit are 'it' and 'itself'.

That doesn't seem odd in Greek because it's a rule that would apply to other personal nouns that are grammatically neuter, such as 'child'.

But in English, to refer to the Spirit as 'it' feels incredibly impersonal.

So the translators opted instead for 'he'.

That is an interesting choice given that 'ruach', the word for Spirit in the Hebrew Bible, is feminine, and that Jesus spoke Aramaic, where the word for Spirit is also feminine.

Does the Bible ever give us reason to see the Spirit as masculine?

Yes, but only occasionally.

So the word for Helper, 'paraclete', which Jesus uses in John's Gospel when he says he will send another Helper, is masculine.

So John 14.26 says, 'But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things.'

The word translated as 'He' in the second half of that sentence isn't a 'He' in Greek, but a neutral demonstrative pronoun that's better translated as something like 'that one'.

That would sound incredibly odd and a bit rude in English, hence some translators leave it out altogether, which works perfectly well, and others use the personal pronoun 'he'.

In the Old Testament there are about half a dozen verses that use the masculine gender for the Spirit.

Apparently ancient Hebrew is a bit more flexible about grammatical gender than some languages, but overwhelmingly the Spirit is feminine.

So in the Bible, the Spirit is feminine, neuter and very occasionally masculine.

And, although you would never guess it, there is a long and rich tradition that regards the Holy Spirit as feminine.

You can find references to the Spirit as Mother and as Wisdom, feminine, in the writings of early church fathers such as Origen, and in the New Testament apocryphal writings.

Zindendorf, who founded the Moravian Church, speaks of the Holy Spirit as Mother.

There is a Jewish concept of Shekinah, God's feminine presence, which is synonymous with the Holy Spirit.

The Syriac Orthodox Church saw the Holy Spirit as feminine and motherly.

So, although the idea of the Spirit as feminine has largely disappeared from contemporary Christianity, it has a long heritage.

Several years after my unsettling experience in that weird upper room, I found myself in a prayer meeting, sat next to a lovely middle-aged Catholic woman.

She was full of warmth and gentleness and joy.

As we sat side by side, she put her arm around my shoulder, she gently prayed for me to be filled with the Spirit, and I had a very beautiful encounter with God.

That evening, she enfleshed the Holy Spirit for me, far, far more effectively than that gang of well-meaning men all those years before.

It was a moment that changed my life very much for the better.

I'm going to take us on a whistle-stop tour of just a few places where we meet the Holy Spirit in the Bible.

You may well be very familiar with them, but they do feel different if you see them deliberately through a feminine lens.

Going right back to the beginning, to the verses we started with, "In the beginning, He, God, created the heavens and the earth.

The earth was formless and shapeless, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while She, the Spirit of God, fluttered over the face of the waters."

Genesis 1, 1-2, translator Gaffney.

Just as an aside, there is a beautiful symmetry here with a description later in the first chapter of Genesis of God creating people, male and female, in God's image.

We get the He and She of God, and then the He and She of people made in the image of the divine, an image that is incomplete without both men and women.

The Holy Spirit is the person of the Trinity who comes closest.

It is She who is most intimately present.

The psalmist writes, "Where can I go from Your Spirit?

Where can I flee from Your presence?

If I go up to the heavens, You are there.

If I make my bed in the depths, You are there."

That's Psalm 139, verses 7-8.

It's the Holy Spirit who endows us with spiritual gifts and inspired the prophets, anointed the kings and the priests, was there in creation, gives us life, and assures us of God's presence.

It was the Spirit who anointed the craftsmen who created the tabernacle.

It is She who breathed inspiration into the Scriptures, who rested upon Jesus and enabled His ministry, as Isaiah predicted.

"The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord."

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor.

He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the year of God's favor."

That was Isaiah 11 32 and 61 1-3.

Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come and be with us forever, calling her a counselor, a helper, and an advocate.

True to His promise, Christians experience the Holy Spirit as a tender, intimate companion, walking with us and guiding us on our journey of following Jesus.

Paul says that when we live in companionship with the Spirit, her character rubs off on us, and we become increasingly full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Galatians 5 22-23.

Christians often talk about the power of the Spirit.

Jesus promised that the Spirit would come upon the disciples with power.

But this isn't power as we usually understand it.

Zechariah the prophet actually has God contrasting that kind of power with the Holy Spirit.

"Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit," says the Lord Almighty.

That's Zechariah 4 6.

This power is the power of goodness.

It's not about coercive force.

It's a feminine power, not a masculine one.

For the disciples, it was the power to tell the good news of Jesus boldly and with courage, and to share His teachings, despite the danger this caused them.

We are increasingly understanding that traditional masculine approaches to leadership, which prioritize tasks, hierarchy, assertiveness, and telling people what to do, have severe limitations.

They can so easily slip into force and threat and coercion, which is no good for anyone.

A feminine approach emphasizes community, equality, cooperation, relationship, empowerment, and persuasion.

Less dramatic, but highly effective, not least because it seeks to use the wisdom and skills of everyone, not just those at the top of the ladder.

This more feminine leadership attracts people to be part of something because it's good, and they want to be involved.

My experience of the Holy Spirit is that this is exactly how she works.

Always gentle, patient, and tender.

Sometimes challenging, but never aggressive.

Always beautiful.

In case you're getting a rather domesticated impression of the Spirit, and starting to think that she's just terribly nice, let me remind you that she is wise, playful, and creative.

Wild and unpredictable.

Jesus compares people who were led by the Holy Spirit to being like the wind.

You never quite know what they might do next, or where they might go.

The Holy Spirit is not a conformist.

She's a dancer.

In his poem Spiritus, Steve Turner begins by describing how he used to see the Spirit as a symphony.

Beautiful, but ordered and predictable.

But now?

Now I see you as a saxophone solo, blowing wildly into the night.

A tongue of fire, flicking in unrepeated patterns.

If we're up for it, the Holy Spirit leads us on adventures.

Little adventures and big ones.

Opportunities to bless people and to be blessed.

Moments when the ordinary world is suddenly resonant with beauty.

So, when I think of what it means to be a woman of God, a woman following Jesus, I think of the Holy Spirit.

Wild, creative, non-conformist, loving, persuasive, bringing counsel and wisdom.

Binding up the broken hearted, setting people free.

Quietly powerful, full of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and gentleness.

And I remember that I am made in her image.

Born again.

Hiding in plain sight in the New Testament, beloved of evangelists everywhere, particularly since the renewal movement of the 1960s, is one of the most powerfully feminine and intimate metaphors in the whole of the Bible.

I'm referring to that bit in John's Gospel where Jesus tells Nicodemus, "Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.

No one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.

Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit."

You can find that in John 3.

This of course is where we get the idea of born again Christians from.

It's not a term we hear so much these days.

When I was getting interested in faith as a teenager in the 1980s, it was a very common way of describing a particular kind of Christian, used variously as an insult, a compliment or an entry requirement depending on your perspective.

Often the people who speak most enthusiastically about the need to be born again are the same people who talk about the Spirit being a gentleman, without ever noticing that there might be a contradiction between those two statements.

All too often the idea of new birth is a somewhat academic concept connected with the spiritual experience that follows a certain kind of introduction to the Christian faith.

So, although people might use the phrase born again, the words are completely separate from the rich metaphor of pregnancy and birth and certainly not linked at all to the awareness of the feminine nature of the Spirit who gives birth to this new life inside us.

The idea of dying to old life and beginning a new life of faith runs throughout the New Testament and this verse in John's Gospel is not the only place where the metaphor of new birth turns up.

John mentions it in the prologue to his Gospel.

"Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.

Children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God."

John 1 12-13.

Peter too uses this metaphor of new birth.

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."

1 Peter 1 verse 3.

And Paul frequently talks about Jesus' death enabling us to be recreated and begin a new life.

There are so many layers to this symbolism.

The idea that before finding faith we are held tenderly in the womb of God.

The sense that finding faith, becoming aware of God and being born might not be a comfortable process.

It will shake us from familiar surroundings into something breathtakingly new.

The fact that the effort and the pain and the travail are God's not ours.

We are used to the idea of an almighty God.

We sometimes forget that God chooses to be vulnerable.

A God who gives birth is certainly vulnerable.

In ancient times when John was writing, pregnancy and birth were not only painful but also dangerous.

To give birth is to risk death.

As we noticed earlier, having been born of God we are invited to crave pure spiritual milk.

To be nursed by God.

For many people finding faith is followed by the discovery of a deep intimate closeness to God.

A sense of being loved and held and cared for in a way that fits very well with these metaphors of being born of God and then nursed by God.

I have been part of a faith tradition that emphasizes the experience of a sudden coming to faith for which the birth metaphor is a particularly good fit.

Not everyone experiences finding faith that way of course.

For many it is far more gradual.

I don't think it's necessary to limit the metaphor of new birth to the moment of encountering God for the first time.

The Holy Spirit is often birthing new things within us.

God's midwifing work in us continues.

The old dies and the new is born.

Again and again.

They are our riches to discover in this idea of God as a mother.

The one who gave you birth and held you tenderly before you even existed.

Paul tells us that we were chosen in him before the foundation of the world.

We are invited to rest in the love of the God who holds us with all the gentle affection of a mother nursing an infant.

Who loves us with all the affection and stubbornness of a mother who will not stop loving no matter how far her children wander.

A mother who will visit us in prison despite knowing that it was our own actions and choices that landed us there.

And bring cake.

Does God care about my socks?

Gather your burdens in a basket in your heart.

Set them at the feet of the mother.

Say, "Take this great mama because I cannot carry all this shit for another minute."

And then crawl into her broad lap and nestle against her ample bosom and take a nap.

Mirabai star.

Wild mercy.

So what difference does it make to invite God the mother into our spiritual lives?

I once heard a speaker talking about the tendency of some people to pray about every detail of their lives.

Stealing God's will even about small decisions.

He said, "You don't need to ask God what socks to wear.

He's your father not your mother."

He was finding a humorous way of saying that God isn't interested in micromanaging our lives.

And at the time it was amusing.

But as we've seen, He was wrong.

God is not just our father.

God is also our mother.

Which means that we can expect to enjoy the kind of close, intimate, mother-child relationship that we saw Isaiah and David describing.

You can talk to her about your socks if you want.

Picture in your mind a woman who wants to become a mother.

If that's been you, then picture yourself.

The longing for a child, the waiting for any sign that she might be pregnant.

Discovering that she is and the excitement and joy.

The nurturing and loving of that new life slowly growing.

Falling irrevocably in love with her newborn child, completely smitten.

The intimacy of breastfeeding.

The unconditional love and care and concern that never goes away.

No matter how long the years and no matter what happens.

Most mothers would give their last penny, their last breath for their kids.

They see beyond their faults and continue to love, care for and protect their children.

Mothers are heartbroken by estrangement.

They visit their children in prison, no matter what they've done.

Unless something has gone badly wrong, they do not stop loving, do not stop being interested, do not stop caring intimately for their kids.

All maternal love finds its source, its ultimate expression in the love of our mother God.

And unlike human parents, God does not have off days or get exhausted.

She doesn't run out of patience and scream at everyone that she just needs leaving alone for five minutes.

This is important.

While our perception of God's love is only paternal, we lose access to the more intimate side of divine love.

It might be culturally conditioned, but our ideas about paternal love are generally more distant and disinterested than maternal love.

Moms don't generally forget that it's sports day on Tuesday or that you've grown out of your school shoes over the holidays.

We imagine mothers as being far more likely to offer emotional support, no matter how insignificant the cause of distress might seem to be.

If I imagine a father having every hair on my head numbered, I think he might have it logged on a spreadsheet.

If I imagine a mother having every hair on my head numbered, I see her gently running her fingers through my hair while I fall asleep with my head on her lap.

Mothers are where the buck stops, whether that's about arranging day-to-day childcare and remembering to pay for school trips or retaining primary care following a break-up.

I got chatting to someone on the bus one time.

I was taking my son somewhere by myself.

She told me that a separated friend of hers had custody of his two children.

She was telling me how terrible it was that his female partner had left him in the lurch and was explaining how incredibly difficult this was for him.

"No more difficult than it would have been for her," I suggested.

There was a pause.

She looked completely thrown and a bit baffled.

"I suppose," she said doubtfully and changed the subject.

The idea that the effort and difficulty encountered by a single father could be merely equivalent to that encountered by a single mother was an alien one.

We are shocked and appalled at the idea that a woman could leave her children in the care of someone else.

We are not surprised if a man does it.

Culturally, maternal love and care is simply assumed.

Paternal love and care is seen as more remarkable.

I haven't been with my second husband very long when my mother witnessed him making porridge for one of my children.

She didn't stop talking about it all weekend.

The making of porridge took on a legendary status.

He couldn't have been more saintly in her eyes had he parted the Red Sea.

He is loving and caring and good at seeing what people need.

It was, I grant you, a nice thing to do.

But if the roles had been reversed, I would not have received adulation for making breakfast for my new partner's children.

It probably would have gone unnoticed.

No wonder we have found it difficult to believe in the constancy and dependency and intimacy of God's love if we only ever see it through the prism of a male lens.

Even those people whose personal experience of paternal love has been exemplary are surrounded by cultural assumptions that say that in general it is not.

One of the concepts we have acquired along with the idea of a male God is the notion of a violent, vengeful God.

Of course, maleness doesn't equal violence.

However, violence is almost exclusively male.

That's a statistical fact.

The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men.

War is generally a male occupation.

We've got used to associating a certain kind of male heroism with shows of violent strength.

When power is male and associated with violent suppression of dissension, then it stands to reason that the most powerful male, God, will become associated with violence and used as an excuse for violence.

The history of the church has done nothing to challenge this idea.

Christianity has been used as a tool of empire by both Romans and Europeans.

When they were not marching across the world with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, Christians were persecuting one another for not having quite the right doctrine.

While the Spanish Inquisition was burning Protestants at the stake, Calvin was setting up a police state in Geneva.

This history serves to reinforce the idea that God enforces his will through violence and strength.

All this despite the fact that in the Incarnation and death of Jesus, God clearly demonstrates a commitment to nonviolence.

The Sermon on the Mount is a pacifist manifesto.

It is the peacemakers, not the warmongers, who are following the example of Christ.

Of course, we can see God as both male and nonviolent, but that does mean working against much of our cultural conditioning about what it means to be male.

Understanding God as feminine is one way to connect with God's essential nonviolence.

Femininity is associated with creation, with nurturing and protection, not destruction.

A solely male depiction of God brings us much closer to the bloke on a cloud with a thunderbolt.

It also puts us much more at risk of misappropriating violent Old Testament stories as possible metaphors for our time.

Coming back to the personal, our long cultural history of seeing God as both male and either violent or approving of violence means we have to work extra hard to convince ourselves that we are not at risk of being on the receiving end.

However many sermons you might hear about God's love, it's not that easy to receive that love while it is linked subconsciously with exclusively male imageries that are culturally loaded with ideas of power and control.

Our cultural archetypes of fathers are inextricably linked with this history of violence and empire.

Things have changed immeasurably for the better in recent decades.

Our ideas about what makes a good dad are so much healthier than they were.

But those old fashioned images of the distant or steer father figure who turns up in period dramas and Victorian literature are still there in our collective subconscious and they have an impact on our spiritual lives.

The ease with which we receive God's love is not only deeply influenced by our cultural context but is also profoundly impacted by our personal experiences of parental love or lack of it.

It is very difficult for people to accept that they have a loving heavenly father if their earthly father was a bit rubbish or completely appalling or not there at all.

This difficulty in relating to God as father is sometimes referred to as a father wound.

So what is the answer?

The basic answer given for people in this situation, however it might be dressed up, is find a way to get over it.

That might entail working out how to forgive your own dad or getting some decent counselling or having some prayer ministry during which you are encouraged to ask the God who frightens you to come close and bring healing.

Here's a thought.

For people who find it incredibly difficult to think of God as father, why don't we simply ask them whether seeing God as mother might be a bit easier and less painful?

And if it is, why don't we suggest they try starting there?

Perhaps there are people out there who are helping people to do just that but in the 40 or so years I've been involved in church I have never once heard anyone make that suggestion.

I know it wouldn't work for everyone but it would for some and it seems blindingly obvious.

So if your dad was useless but your mum did a pretty decent job then start with God's maternal love.

Sort out your father wound later.

Don't let it be a barrier to experiencing God's love.

Do you have an image or a memory of being with your mother or even a grandmother?

Can you picture yourself there and invite God to be with you in your imagination?

Viewing God through the lens of motherhood changes the way we relate to her.

It opens up different perspectives, different emotions, a different way of loving and receiving love.

Exactly how that plays out for you will depend on your experience and perception of motherhood but whatever your particular perception it will definitely open vistas that will not be there for you if you only see God as father.

It might be that you find it easier to experience care and intimacy.

Perhaps you're a mother and you find it easier to invite God into that experience when you're contemplating her divine motherhood.

It might be that you're more able to talk to God about the minutiae of your life, about your socks or your children's socks or the unavailability of red t-shirts in Asda when you suddenly remember that school is doing Chinese New Year on Wednesday.

Perhaps you can trust the care of your children to the divine more wholeheartedly when you are relating to her as mother.

Maybe the faithfulness of mothers makes it easier to trust in the constancy and reliability of God's love.

I challenge you to try it out.

Make yourself a cuppa, find somewhere comfy and imagine yourself sitting down for a conversation with your Heavenly Mum.

Make that the starting point in context of your prayer today.

You might need to do this a few times before it moves from feeling just plain weird to actually being helpful, but it's worth persisting with.

Notice what this practice adds to your spiritual life.

So there it is.

I hope you enjoyed it and the link for the Kindle and the paperback version which you can find on Amazon is in the show notes.

And hopefully the audiobook should be out fairly soon.

Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

If you'd like to get in touch, you can email lovedcalledgifted@gmail.com.

You can find a transcript of this podcast at lovedcalledgifted.com.

And that's also the place to go if you're interested in the Loved Called Gifted course or if you'd like to find out about spiritual direction or coaching.

Thank you for listening.