Earth's Children: Religion

One reason why I thought Mom would be uncomfortable with this series was due to the female deity that the characters in the series worshipped. Many members of our church insisted that God is male, that any attempt to change the gender of God (or even to say that, technically speaking, a spirit capable of creating the entire universe from nothing but his own intention to create probably wouldn't experience or rely upon gender as part of their identity in the same ways in which human beings tend to interact with it) was sinful. Only someone in too much contact with the outside world,  those Secular Humanists, those Radical Feminists whose minds the devil addled in an attempt to lure them forever away from God would argue for something like this.

Not even to barely in my teens, I quietly questioned this line of reasoning. I still believed in God, of course.  But, as much as I never would have admitted it in church, I didn't understand why so many adults who provided otherwise excellent advice were so stubbornly convinced of the masculinity of our creator. It wasn't that I wanted to replace our masculine pronouns and metaphors with a church of the Divine Feminine.

I simply could not understand how I, a near-woman, could be made in the image of God if the only acceptable image of God was as a man. In my opinion at the time, either everyone was made in the image of a God beyond (or between? or in the midst of every?) gender, or God was actually just a man all along and therefore only half of us were actually of His image.

I knew these thoughts were sacrilegious for that time and place. But I also knew that religion as I knew was rapidly becoming a poor fit for me in this area. If I couldn't have a church that was willing to listen to other ideas about the gender of God, at least I had books which looked at this issue from another perspective.

The next post in this series will talk about relationships in the Earth's Children series.

(Photo credit.)