Home Book Purchase Back Four Relational Forms

Divinity Imaged in the Hetairan Form/ Longing

 

 

As a theological and a devotional inquiry, the question of inclusion of the feminine in the godhead has a lengthy history. In 1934 Toni Wolff commented on the issue in referring to the significance of Christian women's exclusion from the godhead.

When Wolff referred to the religious symbol as an expression of the human being in his totality, she also spoke of a question occurring frequently in the context of her therapeutic experiences with women' self-realization. Wolff's lecture questioned whether the disorientation of modern women might not be connected with the absence of a feminine Godhead in the Protestant as well as in the Jewish religion. The image of god is the supreme symbol of the highest human attributes and of the most far-reaching ideas of the human spirit. How then can woman find herself if her own psychological principle and all its complexities are not objectified in a symbol, as in the case of man? The symbol takes effect in the human being by gradually unfolding its meaning. The relationship with the Deity keeps man in continuous contact with all the conscious and unconscious contents which the Deity symbolically expresses. Since the Reformation, the feminine principle has disappeared from the church, both in its concrete and in it spiritual aspect: through the destruction of images, on the one hand and the elimination of the concept of the mother of God, on the other.

In Wolff's analysis, the cultural exclusion of the feminine imaging of the Godhead relates to the significance of objectifying knowledge via symbols of relational status. If the symbol is stripped of power, so much more so is it a novel proposition to propose a divine desiring image, an image of a god longing for and loving each life form, each aspect of reality. It would seem that the vulnerability of longing for a person expresses lack and incompletion without that other. This also implies that we are unable to identify any longing or yearning which the god has for creation. The paradox of lack characterizing the godhead is not part of traditional Western images of God.

Imagining that they are expressing God's yearning for you, listen to Dusty Springfield singing You Don't Have to Say You Love Me and then to Jeanne Lee singing I Thought of You. For the masculine expression of a god completed by the Other, listen to Shlomo Carlebach's Lekhah Dodi, Come My Beloved.

Take advantage of the full screen option: click the lower right icon.

Pete Seeger reminds us--via The Worried Man's Blues--to hold out hope. He conjures up a merciful judge. Like the Sin-Eater Goddesses, the merciful Gods love, forgive, and take on themselves the sufferings caused by sinners.

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
I'm worried now but I won't be worried long

I went across the river and I lay down to sleep
I went across the river and I lay down to sleep
I went across the river and I lay down to sleep
When I woke up I had shackles on my feet

Twenty-one links of chain around my leg
There was twenty one links of chain around my leg
Twenty-one links of chain around my leg
And upon each link there's an initial of my name

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
I'm worried now but I won't be worried long

I asked that judge, "What's gonna be my fine?"
Asked that judge, "Say, what's gonna be my fine?"
I asked that judge, "What's gonna be my fine?"
Said, "Twenty-one years on the Rocky Mountain mine"

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
Yes, it takes a worried man to sing a worried song
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
I'm worried now but I won't be worried long