Calling God "Mother"

An interesting thing happened at the Advocate today. In connection with Mothers Day, the vicar invited us to participate in an experiment in which we referred to God as Mother instead of Father, Christ as Daughter instead of Son, Queen instead of King, Her instead of Him, etc. The point was to pay attention to our reactions as we did this. Were we comfortable calling God "Mother"? Why or why not? Since Episcopalians don't understand God as a physical being with a penis, it's not self-evident that God needs to be spoken of as male (though of course theological conservatives offer various explanations as to why we should). In an open-ended way, the vicar was inviting the congregation to reflect on why people seem to find it so uncomfortable to speak of God as female.

On this blog, I tend to favor gender-neutral language for God, though I'll refer to God as male or female or both ("Heavenly Father and Mother") as I feel moved by the Spirit in a given context. I don't believe literally that God has a physical body and therefore a gender, though the icon of God as such a being is extremely important to me—one of the things I prize about the LDS tradition that's lacking in other Christian traditions. As we went through the service today plugging in female language where the prayer book and the hymns come with male language, I found it meaningful to recite the Nicene Creed with God as "the Mother, the Almighty," or to begin the Lord's Prayer with "Our Mother in heaven, hallowed be your name." When they started calling Christ "Daughter," or to say "she" in reference to Jesus, I found that distracting, for aesthetic reasons more than theological ones. At LiberalMormon.net, I've made the case for there being resources in the LDS tradition that let us envision Christ as female, and on this blog I've used gender-neutral language when speaking of Christ as a heavenly being or the incarnation of God. But when we start talking about Jesus as a mortal being, that's the point at which I'm just going to say "he."

It was an interesting experiment, though, adding a new dimension to today's worship. When I blessed the sacrament for myself today, I decided to continue the experiment. So the sacrament prayers (which I normally recite in a tweaked version anyway to trim out archaic King James language) came out like this:

O God, Eternal Mother,
we ask you in the name of your Child, Jesus Christ,
to bless and sanctify this bread
to the souls of all those who partake of it,
that they may eat in remembrance of the body of your Child,
and witness to you, O God, Eternal Mother,
that they are willing to take upon them the name of your Child,
and always remember him,
and keep his commandments which he has given them,
that they may always have his Spirit to be with them.

O God, Eternal Mother,
we ask you in the name of your Child, Jesus Christ,
to bless and sanctify this wine
to the souls of all those who drink of it,
that they may do it in remembrance of the blood of your Child,
which was shed for them;
that they may witness to you, O God, Eternal Mother,
that they do always remember him,
that they may have his Spirit to be with them.

BTW, if you find it artificially p.c. to refer to Christ as God's "Child," that language actually appears in Moroni 8:3.