He and She: Reflections on the Gender of God

Some years ago I became preoccupied with the problem of God’s gender because the nearly universal religious conception of God as masculine seemed to me to exclude those qualities which are typically ascribed to the (non-divine) feminine, despite the fact that these qualities are paradoxically among the most divine of attributes—compassion, unconditional love, empathy, caring, kindness, joy, benevolence, generosity, beauty, wisdom, serenity, silence, intuition, creativeness, and so on. but I always felt uneasy at the thought of calling God ‘She’, primarily because the scriptures of all religious traditions do almost invariably speak of God as ‘He’, and I could not just overlook millennia of religious beliefs simply because it irks me.

Then it dawned on me: though in reality God is beyond gender, the masculine aspect of God is God as apprehend through language—the God whose Name can be uttered; while the feminine aspect of God is God’s subtle, secret, inexpressible reality. And as the true dignity of God is not expressed with words, so is this feminine aspect of God alone worthy of God’s essence. God as ‘She’ cannot be captured in a form, ‘She’ cannot be formulated; yet humans can experience and know Her intuitively when the Sakīna—the serene quietude of God’s presence—descends on the soul in the depths of contemplative prayer. God is most honoured not by being spoken of—especially since the most ungodly of humans routinely do speak in His name—but in being loved and served with reverential awe.

The pronoun ‘He’ ascribed to God only seems to exalt the masculine—hence attributing divine power to the male—but the apparent triumph of the masculine in this tangible world of empty shows and deceptive appearances is in reality a tragic degradation. For the Real Life is not the life of this world; God is not known in it, and only when our heart turns towards Her transcendent, unspeakable reality do we encounter the God who exists beyond words. The masculine God can be—as He has been in all religious traditions—appropriated and instrumentalized by men to sanctify their greed for this-worldly domination, but God as ‘She’ is pristine and virginal: She cannot be possessed, and Her presence cannot be captured in words. She cannot be confined and objectified. She is, and there is no other beside Her.

As revealed to humans, God is both apparent and unseen, masculine and feminine—both uttered Word and silent Wisdom. It is as though the spoken God were the son of the ineffable God, as Jesus is the son of Mary. The soul’s experience of the reality of God surpasses language. Still, the experience yearns to be known, and moves us to express it in words. The experience was She; Her expression is He. And while the manifest God tends to accentuate the divide between ‘He’ and ‘She’ by exalting Himself above His counterpart (as speech dominates silence), the hidden God instead tends to reconcile ‘He’ and ‘She’ in Herself, and through this reconciliation, to transfigure His spoken Word and infuse it with the unspeakable mystery of the Real.