Expanding the Metaphors | By Trish McBride
This article is published in the July 2025 issue of Refresh - Sacred Feminine
Thomas Aquinas’ saying that ‘all language about God is analogy’[1] was for me a freeing delight. This immediately de-literalises the standard God-words.
All our words for God, as with any metaphor, are saying ‘there are ways in which God is like this’, but they can never fully contain the Infinite, nor can they be mutually exclusive. When we acknowledge the ineffable, beyond-anything-we-can-imagine nature of the Divine, how true this seems!
I assume readers’ familiarity with the male and non-human Scriptural metaphors for the Divine. Also, with those of the Divine as Mother Eagle (Deut 32.10-12), Mother Bear (Hosea 13.8) Mother Hen (Matt 23.37), as Baker-woman (Matt13.33), and a pregnant (Deut 32.18) or nursing mother (Isa 49.15).
Sadly, these feminine images have been systematically excluded from the communal liturgical Christian expression of faith for most of its existence. This centuries-old exclusion both drew from and reinforced the prevailing patriarchal cultures.
Our God images, healthy or otherwise, are formed not only by Scripture and liturgy, but also by our early life experiences, especially with our fathers, because of the constant use of the Father image of God in the liturgy. Is there a discrepancy between faith (‘God loves me’) and the actual experience of and relating to the Divine? Noxious images of God can be based unconsciously on the experience of intolerant and demanding fathers. There are many people burdened by such images.
How are people experiencing Divine Love these days?
There are beautiful images that theologians, the truth-seekers, have offered us:
Ground of our Being[2]
Life-giver, Pain-Bearer, Love-Maker[3]
God as ‘Verb’[4]
Mother Sophia[5]
God is simply, cosmically, and prophetically the spirit of hospitality itself [6]
Here are more images that have fed my spirit. Marcella Althaus Reid (Professor of Theology, Edinburgh University) speaks of ‘Queer God’, the God who does not ‘keep the rules’, who ‘queers the pitch’, who champions the poor, marginalised and dispossessed, and yes, there are sexual connotations as well [7].
Philip Culbertson and Tavita Maliko look at the Pacific Island traditions of a ‘third gender’ (fa’afafine in Samoan): ‘If we could push further apart the gendered metaphors we ordinarily use for God, what might we find in ‘the marginalized center?’[8]
Within the spiritual direction context, I understand God as already operating in many guises and disguises: in an atheist’s awe at a mountain sunset; in the experience of ‘being in another dimension’ that musicians can have; in community as it is lived in many so-called ‘secular’ settings; in the soft purple rug that comforts an abuse victim.
The key question: is the experience or image life-giving? If so, God is there! It is through people’s own healing and awe-provoking images that God can both work and be experienced as Love. All is sacred!
Because of how life has been, I, along with countless other women, eventually found the virtually exclusive naming of the Divine as male in Christian culture and liturgies not simply intellectually distasteful, but deeply and physically painful. Being able to say ‘God… She’ was a release.
When this becomes one’s natural mode of naming, it makes remaining committed to Sunday services very difficult. Have you ever counted the number of times ‘Father’, ‘Lord’ and ‘He’ appear in a standard Sunday liturgy? Can be fifty or more! I have been heart-sick as yet another generation of girls learns by subliminal Sunday osmosis that their fathers and brothers are like God in a way they cannot ever match.
I - we - have found we need a God who knows what it is like to be Woman! Admittedly, this too is only part of the story. When some years ago I shared my perspective with my minister, he rightly pointed out that simply giving God a feminine ‘identity’ and naming is as inaccurate as using the traditional masculine. I wasn’t quick enough that day to reply ‘True, but why use one inaccuracy 99.9% of the time?’ That is working on the intellectual level.
But then there is Jung: we human beings of both/all genders, need to integrate both female and male elements (anima, animus) within our psyche. Without both, balance is missing. This too has something to do with God.
What if, for their most profound identification with and relationship to both their own anima and the Divine, women need innately to image God primarily as feminine like themselves? Just as much as men, including the fully human Jesus, need to image God as masculine like themselves? What of the men who need to image God as feminine?
From her research on images of God among mid-life Catholic women, Mary Betz reported them in 2005[9] as describing God thus:
‘[She] was deeply present, close, yet bigger than anyone could fathom… the painter of sunsets, creator of opportunity, … in the ever-changing light over the sea: in-dwelling in each person and in relationships… a feminine presence, a well of love, nurturer; continually enfolding, empowering towards freedom; birth-giver…; in the storm which stirs up the depths, calling us to growth.’
There is an underground river of women’s spirituality emerging from the depths after 5000 years or so of suppression by patriarchal religions. It is happening both within and beyond the churches, but the similarities of expressions in these various streams are too close to be ignored.
The Divine Feminine is awakening the world with new hope for peace, respect for other human beings, the rest of life, our beautiful planet and the entire universe. God is manifesting as She chooses! Can the Christian Church respond to the invitation to enrich itself and all its people by giving equal value to the ancient and new feminine images of the Divine, of God?
There are the communally imposed or taught metaphors, appropriate - or not - to the hearers, and there are the metaphors that emerge from within individual souls. I believe that those generated by each human person will be the most effective in connecting them with the Divine.
Can we supplement our current images of the Divine with the wonderful kaleidoscope we have on offer today? Who does Goddess/God want to be for me? For you? For the Christian tradition as expressed in the churches? Perhaps we dare say to Goddess/God ‘How shall we newly name you?’
And how can we more deeply comprehend the old image whose depths are never fully plumbed - God is Love? People are so hungry for love and acceptance. How can the Church more effectively use its formal language to share this Good News?
For those of us who minister: I believe it is crucial to own the images of God we ourselves have internalised, to have some sense of where they came from, what they bring - healing or harm, and why they are the ones we choose to retain.
Are we able to engage respectfully with the images of God of those to whom we minister? Are we able to help them discern the helpfulness or otherwise of their images to their relationship with the Divine?
It would be sublimely sensitive if as ministers, we could enquire about the images of God that are relevant to those to whom we minister, without making assumptions from our own vocabulary and experience. Questions like ‘How do you see/imagine God?’, ‘What words do you have for your God?’, and ‘How would you like me to pray for/with you?’
If, as a minister, I am to wash someone’s feet, I move from my own comfortable ground to kneel reverently on the ground that he/she occupies. Apply this verbally: if someone who is being ministered to can only relate to God as feminine, it is a hurtful violation to impose a ‘Heavenly Father’ and ‘God … He’.
This applies equally, of course, in the other direction: when I am working with those who use traditional male words for God, in love I use their language for the sake of their peace. Not that it is easy, but it must be done!
While theologically it is acknowledged that God is beyond gender, I believe the thoughtless use of one deficient set of gendered words virtually all the time is insupportable, even if the other set is equally inadequate. To quote Fr Neil Darragh, ‘The Church can no longer use male God-language in innocence’.
Where there is a strong correlation between communally used metaphors and those potent ones that arise from within the psyche, the Good News will be heard and received at a deeper level by women.
The dream I have for the Church is that both feminine and masculine metaphors for Goddess/God will be equally acknowledged and articulated: Mother and Father, Sophia and Logos, Papatuanuku (Earth-Mother) and Ranginui (Sky Father). Not two Gods, but two equally valued images of God, two metaphors for the Divine!
Extracts from a paper published in The God Book: Talking about God Today, ed. Neil Darragh, (Auckland: Accent Publications, 2008) pp 219-229.
[1] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Article 9.
[2] Paul Tillich, 1962.
[3] Personal communication. This was Jim Cotter’s original wording of his version of the Lord’s Prayer, modified to ‘Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver’ for inclusion in A New Zealand Prayer-book, The Church of the Province of New Zealand, Collins, 1989 (Anglican Prayer Book, p181).
[4] Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, Mary Daly, Beacon Press, Boston. 1973, pp 33, 34.
[5] Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is, Crossroad, NY, 1992. pp 170-87.
[6] Glynn Cardy, ‘Hot Winter Broth’, Tui Motu InterIslands, August 2007 p 20.
[7] Marcella Althaus Reid, Geering Lectures, St Andrew’s Trust, 2005.
[8] Philip Culbertson & Tavita Maliko, ‘A g-string is not Samoan: Exploring a Trans-gressive Third-Gender Pasifika Theology.’ Concilium 324, February 2008, pp. 62-72.
[9] Mary Betz, ‘Who do I mean by God?’ Tui Motu InterIslands, March 2005.
Trish McBride treasures her long years as a directee. She is happily settled in a Wellington retirement village. She has had significant policy involvement with the Royal Commission and looks forward to increased justice and compassion for survivors from all churches.
This article was featured in the Sacred Feminine issue of Refresh - July 2025.
Refresh is SGM’s journal of contemplative spirituality in Aotearoa, New Zealand. You can view the current issue of Refresh or browse the archives in the Refresh section of this website.
