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Margaret Starbird - author of The Woman With The Alabaster Jar, and other works, here is an excerpt from an article titled "Imaging God As Partner":

One late autumn Sunday in 1987 I attended Mass in a Roman Catholic Church in the middle of Tennessee. Over the altar that day, probably created in anticipation of the upcoming feast of Christ the King, was a large black banner with a mosaic design in orange, yellow, and red. The banner depicted a church steeple silhouetted against the sunrise, and the bright orange letters proclaimed "Every day is SON day."

Throughout the celebration of the Mass that morning, I was disturbed and distracted. I was thinking about the little girls in white stockings and shiny black shoes just beginning to learn to read, carefully picking out the letters on the banner, as children often do. I was deeply troubled. How would these little ones feel about the blunt and blatant message of the black and orange banner? How would their older sisters feel? And their mothers.

After Mass, I stopped to talk to the parish priest greeting his parishioners in the crisp October sunlight, wishing us all "good morning." I told him how uncomfortable I was with the message on the banner, and he was truly astounded. It had never occurred to him that it might be offensive or even controversial. "It's an historical fact," he told me. "Everyone knows that God sent his Son. Maybe next time He will send a daughter." Then he started to laugh.

I understood why he was laughing. Everyone knows that God does not have a daughter. The Christian creed says that Jesus is the "Only Begotten of the Father, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father." HE is light from light, true God from true God. In orthodox doctrine there is no SHE. I turned away and sought my car parked across the sunny parking lot, barely seeing it through my tears. God sends daughters every day, I thought, just as God sends sons. Fully half of the kingdom of God is feminine. And yet, in Christian churches worldwide "every day is SON day."

That SON day in Tennessee was a great awakening for me. I began to be ever more conscious of the way society teaches us from our birth to worship the Son. I found numerous promotions for Christian worship that played on the sun-pun—classics like "Sun worship here at 9:00 A.M." posted in front of a church on Hillsborough Road and another that read "SONday Service at 10:30 A.M." I became more and more appalled at the unbalance manifested in our fundamental worship experiences, for as we must begin to realize, what we worship, we become. That is why the Hebrew prophets insisted so emphatically that no image of God be made, for God is beyond images. God is the One, the Source, the I AM. Not in our likeness is God made, but we are made in the likeness of God, "male and female" as we are told in Genesis. One of the earliest words for God in the Hebrew Scriptures is Elohim—a plural noun, gender not specified, both male and female. Whenever the people of the Hebrew nation turned to worship created idols, they were firmly chastised by their leaders for their unfaithful, wanton behavior, prostituting themselves before false gods. Images of the Divine fashioned from wood or stone were anathema to the God of Israel.

One afternoon, a few months after my experience with the church banner, I was riding on highway I-65 south from Nashville where I was a student at the Vanderbilt Divinity School. I noticed the trash accumulated along the highway and was sad that respect for themselves and others did not restrain people from littering the landscape and the beloved planet Earth with their trash. I was aware that the car radio was on and I tuned in for a moment to hear report of a young mother who had that day tossed her newborn baby into the incinerator chute. Both angry and horrified, I remember asking aloud, "Where did we lose it? This is supposed to be a Christian nation and I am residing in the Bible Belt. Why are we trashing our neighborhoods and our children this way?" The newscast had gone off the air, and now a song was playing on a country music station: "When the sun always shines, there's a desert below..."

I remember staring at the radio on the dashboard of my car, realizing that the answer to my question was coming to me on the air waves. The message was getting louder and clearer: “It takes a little rain to make a garden grow.” When the "sun" or "masculine" principle is worshipped without its feminine counterpart, the wasteland ensues. Today we are more than ever aware of the ravaging of the planet and wasteful devastation of her resources. Where power and might are the highly honored attributes of the reigning deity, they become the most honored qualities of the society that worships them, for "as above, so below," or, in the words of Jesus himself, "on earth as it is in heaven." Having enthroned a celibate and male image of God and excluded any feminine counterpart for this image, we now reap the inevitable consequences of a society "burned out" under the influence of that unbalanced solar/power principle, oblivious perhaps to the inherent danger, for the ultimate result of sun worship is holocaust.

And yet, there is another way open to us.... (for the rest of the article go to this page and scroll down to the article.

Amy Oden - D ean of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and from her book "God's Welcome: Hospitality For a Gospel-Hungry World"

..."As Christians we have a theological word for this ongoing welcome of God: salvation. Salvation is the continual presence and activity of God in our lives, welcoming us deeper into the divine life through being a disciple of Jesus Christ...Everything we do, every conversation we have, every task we pursue, every meal we cook, God's saving work is in it all. God's salving/saving fills our congregatonal lives too: in Sunday worship and youth lockins, in committee meetings and mission trips, in mowing the lawn and tending the nursery. But it doesn't stop there. God's expansive, welcoming work is going on outside our own congregations as well. God's saving work--salvation--is bigger than us, bigger than our church, bigger than our denomination. Salvation cannot be contained. This is especially good news when we despair of the foibles of our all-too-human congregations."

"The whole of each of our lives and our life together is the landscape for God's welcoming, salving work. Salvation is happening all the time. God's welcome is happening all the time. It is a welcome feast. This is good news indeed, and one that people are hungry to hear. The good news is so deep in the bones of the Christian message that we may take it for granted. When we take it for granted, however, we withhold the food of grace from those who are spiritually hungry. Too many people have heard that salvation is something God will grant once they get their act together, or once they start going to church or reading the Bible. For others, salvation is a ticket they got one time on their knees, and now they must wait for the real thing after they die."

"In Her Words: Women's Writings in the History of Christian Thought":

..."Where were the women? What did they have to say? How did they shape the life and thought of the church? For many of us, the courses we took in church history or the history of Christian theology left these questions unanswered. By implication, the impression we received was that these questions could not be answered; there ws no record by women. Indeed, we have texts aplenty telling us what Christianity has thought about women, but what have women thought about Christianity?...The women in this book do not all speak in one voice, and given the opportunity to gather together (what a wonderful thought!) would probably find themelves in serious disagreement about many things...neither do they speak with twentieth century voices. They used the language of their day to make their claims, and seldom will it read like a feminist manifesto...However, there is plenty of shared territory if we are careful listeners. We honor these women when we ask first what their questions are and what they see as important, when we listen carefully, and when we take each writing on its own within the historical and personal context in which it was written.

"...In much of the writing by women in almost all periods of Christian history, self-deprecating disclaimers and phrases were used. Often self-deprecation was a literary device that would no more be left out than good grammar. This can be very jarring, or at least disconcerting to the twentieth century reader, but should not lead to the conclusion that these writers believed themselves lacking all authority...Read these writings with the presumption that the women who wrote them knew themselves to be powerful and liberating messengers of God.

Mary E. Hunt - director of Women's Alliance For Theology, Ethics, and Ritual, author of "Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Tenderness," from which comes this excerpt:

"Perhaps the most suggestive image for the divine that emerges out of women's friendships is not one divinity but many. Just as friends do not exist in the singular, neither is it feasible to imagine that something as complex and comprehensive as divinity could be singular either. There may even be a hint of this insight in the Christian trinitarian theologies, though I avoid the language of the hypostatic union. The point is that thinking of the divine as one friend reinforces a relationless content and minimizes the extent to which the divine, for all of its glory, is still more available through human imaginings.

"...Human community flows from divine inspiration. People recognize common roots and celebrate the common condition as friends of the One who nurtures so many. This imagery is born out in the history of common suffering and promise that religious traditions have chronicled. Likewise it is useful for breaking down the particularities that set up hierarchies of privilege and dominance.

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