The Woman Clothed with the Sun
God is female.
Please notice what that sentence evokes in you—does it elicit an eye-roll at the supposed excesses of progressivism, an obvious “Hell, yes She is!” affirmation, or something in between?
Our associations of God with gender are complex and deeply personal, all bound up with our experiences of fathers and mothers.
As a text written in a patriarchal culture, handed down through more patriarchal cultures, and read within our own patriarchal cultures, the Bible and we are complicit in naming God falsely and in a necessarily limiting way as usually male. Tragically, we men have wreaked so much violence and anger in our wake that many just assumed God the Father was a distant, wrathful deity who basically hated us. We swallowed the toxic theology that messaged the same. But a knee-jerk, smash-the-patriarchy response doesn’t approach the sensitivity needed for such tender concerns, either. The female preacher at church recently took my breath away by talking about her own difficulty with female language for God because of trauma associated with her mother. This preacher’s youthful mothering experiences took place with her nurturing father. The point is that rejecting or affirming God through a one-dimensional gender analysis just won’t do: fathers can be nurturing, mothers can be traumatizing, we all carry complex worlds within us, and God by nature of being God is beyond gender, while still including the fullness and varieties of gender.
For me, to call God female seems like an obvious and uncontroversial observation. Of course God is Father and Mother equally—and a non-binary plurality of genders, at that. After all, the Trinity demonstrates that God often uses “they/them” pronouns. Jesus the man is also the feminine Wisdom-Sophia incarnate, and the Holy Spirit is the female (in Hebrew ruach) wind or breath that permeates reality. And yet even yesterday at church (and the week before that), there I am standing, reciting the Nicene Creed and wincing at the maleness of it all. I like to sneak in a surreptitious “She” for the Holy Spirit, which still feels insufficient and too theologically easy, but it’s better than not have Her being mentioned at all.
A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.
–Revelation 12:1
In this sprawling, visionary, apocalyptic, most-difficult-book-of-the Bible, we are confronted with a striking and radiant image: a cosmic woman clothed with the sun. The author John of Patmos has scrawled his seven letters to seven churches, seven seals of those letters have been opened, and seven trumpets have been blasted. Subversive hymns have been sung and revelatory scenes from the heavens have been unveiled. Here yet, is another. The cosmic woman is pregnant, in the process of giving birth, and a dragon is poised, ready to pounce and kill her child. She gives birth right at the edge of the dragon’s jaws. Her child is rescued—taken to God’s throne—while she flees for respite and protection in the wilderness.
Image: “The woman and the dragon,” Bamberg Apocalypse, ca. 1000, public domain
Who is this woman? Is this a mythical retelling of Mary giving birth to Jesus Christ in the midst of Herod’s dragon-like reign of terror? Is the woman a stand-in for the people of God, ancient Israel fleeing Egyptian slavery into the wilderness? Is she the church battling the trials of heresy, as some have thought? The prophet Isaiah, upon whom John of Patmos draws, compares a woman writhing with child to the people Israel (Isaiah 26:18).
Surely there are myths swirling in John’s cultural air, too: both Greek Artemis and Roman Diana are goddesses often associated with the moon. When Artemis’s mother Leto is pregnant with her and twin Apollo, she flees a dragon named Python. Sounds very similar, if you ask me. Whatever our meaning-making choices, there’s also the unmistakable cosmic nature of it all. The woman is clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, and wearing a crown of twelve stars. She will not be truncated only into a historical parallel. She is a goddess, an archetype, a feminine incarnation who faces down evil and survives.
I’m honestly not sure what to make of it all except to say that the Woman Clothed with the Sun somehow matters, having cosmic Christ/goddess imagery somehow matters, and praying with Her and to Her somehow matters. She expands our prayerful imaginations and helps us break out of our God-boxes. She is fearless in staring down evil while yet giving birth to good. She battles the pains of labor in determined hope that something new and deeply good is on the way. She understands that choices between love and fear have universal impact, and that the stakes for people and the planet are high. She knows when it’s time for rest and renewal and makes urgent haste to Her haven. She reminds us that if we only have earth-bound images of God, then our God is too small.
Image: Zion, “Woman Clothed with the Sun,” December 23, 2020, Creative Commons
In the book God is a Black Woman, scholar-author Christena Cleveland goes on a pilgrimage to discover Black feminine expressions of God. Her discoveries demonstrate the transforming power of female imagery in Christian tradition. Her raw and wise book tells of her visiting sites in France to encounter Black Madonnas and the inner reckoning with racism she undergoes to find freedom. Cleveland dissects the many ways that the image of a white, patriarchal God—which she cleverly names whitemalegod—kept her in bondage, and the liberating lessons she learns from God as a Black woman. In a particularly ingenious move, she reinterprets historical titles of Black Madonnas into enlivening, healing names: Our Lady of the Sick, located in Vichy, France, becomes She Who Cherishes Our Hot Mess; Our Lady of the Fountain in Mende, France, is called She Whose Thick Thighs Save Lives.
The healing remedies Cleveland receives from Black Madonnas are specific to Black women and also universal. Dwelling above a thermal spring, Our Lady of the Sick / She Who Cherishes Our Hot Mess, became a pilgrimage destination for the sick and hurting. Cleveland finds symbolic, liberating power in Our Lady of the Sick because during French Revolution, Her head was cut off and her jewels robbed. She knows what it is like to endure pain and to be mended whole. She welcomes our need and, unlike whitemalegod, does not compel us to swallow or deny it. Through visiting, studying, and praying with Black Madonnas, Cleveland shows us the liberating power of knowing God as a Black woman.
Image: Black Madonna / Our Lady of Montserrat, Creative Commons
I haven’t heard yet of any historical Black Madonnas that exist representing the Woman Clothed with the Sun, but that doesn’t need to stop us from encountering her as a Black woman. She is a cosmic, Black, female God—or representation of Christ, if you prefer—who radiates light from sun and moon and is crowned with stars. She knows the suffering that we create and undergo on Earth, from climate catastrophe, hunger, poverty, and wars between countries. Without losing Her cosmic shine, she joins us in our labor pains, beckoning us to find respite, preparing us for the trials ahead.
As always, I love to hear from you. You can reply directly to this email, and I will receive it, or leave a comment below. I hope you have a wonderful month of June.
This is a wonderful post. One comment: There's a great typo in the second to last paragraph: "...the Woman Clothed with the Son." Interesting to think about that meaning! And another comment: It's of course interesting to think about God as non-binary -- exactly how we should be thinking of "them" -- in a time when so many religious (and other) organizations are fighting gender fluidity and trans rights tooth and nail. It all feeds into the dangerous and seditious Christian Nationalism movement, which is also a white male supremacy movement. Thank you, Mark, for keeping us open-hearted.
Thank you for this wonderful and thought-provoking post! I am not unfamiliar with the concept of God as female and when we speak the Creed at church I alternate 'Mother' and 'Father' in the text, but as you say, it doesn't feel enough. I once asked our female vicar why we only used male pronouns for God and she replied, "God is neither male nor female so we're not saying that God is male", which of course we literally are, and she would not entertain the idea of changing pronouns. It is an ongoing work. Thank you for offering inspiration for the journey.