She Who Hears the Cries of the World | By Jemma Allen
Photo credit: Jemma Allen
This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of Refresh - Sacred Feminine
Guanyin sits on my desk. She is a Buddhist figure, a Bodhisattva, one who rather than be released into Nirvana herself stays to offer compassion and to help others be free of their suffering. Some liken her to Christ – one who gives up one’s life for the sake of others.[1] Some refer to her as the Goddess of Compassion. While generally regarded as a Buddhist figure, she is also found in Daoism and in Chinese folk religions.
I first met her in a vegetarian restaurant in Hong Kong – her Cantonese name often written as Kwan/Kuan Yin. She stands as a symbol of compassion that extends to all living things and therefore is at the entrance to the restaurant, blessing the practice of those who refrain from eating creatures.
As someone deeply anchored in a Christian spirituality, an Anglican priest with a theology degree, I at first found it difficult to understand my sense of attraction or connection to this sacred feminine figure.
I had been fortunate to grow up in a liturgical space that was careful about language, where to pray ‘Mother and Father of us all’ was not particularly radical, and since my late teens had been part of contemplative and liturgical spaces that overtly evoked the Divine Feminine.
Paying attention to this sense of connection, however, brought some things into awareness. Important to me is that Guanyin isn’t seen as a mother. So much of the Sacred Feminine in our Christian tradition is maternal. God as breast-feeding mother, a fierce mother bear, an eagle hovering over her young. Mary as a radical, chanting her Magnificat protest hymn, casting down the rich and the powerful, but also always as a mother.
I am a childless woman. I am a woman without a uterus. I have had my belly patted consolingly and been told I am a spiritual mother, but that is not a posture that resonates with me (and to be fair, my similarly childless husband has never been patted and told that it doesn’t matter that he has no actual children because he is a spiritual father to many). I love being an aunt and a godmother and am deeply grateful for the children in our lives. And, I am not a mother.
Whether by intention or by infertility or by any other barrier to bearing children, childless women too reflect the face of the Divine, of the Sacred Feminine, and are made in the image of God.
She Who Is cannot be reduced to a baby-bearing body, a child-rearing body, a ‘wife and mother.’ Pointing to the Sacred Feminine should not reinforce narrow gender binaries or try and locate an ‘essence’ of what is feminine in the maternal.
Guanyin is often connected to a figure in Buddhism who is an Indian Prince, Avalokitesyara. This prince, another Bodhisattva, is transformed in culture and gender to become Guanyin, an East-Asian feminine expression of Divine Compassion. One of the stories told about Guanyin is that when asked why she had transitioned from a male form to that of a woman, she explained that she would appear in whatever form and gender best let her ease the suffering of the person in her care.
Image credit: Jemma Allen
Perhaps part of what the Sacred Feminine teaches us is that God is more interested in meeting us, and those we travel with, in ways that ease our suffering and bring us to wholeness than in the traditional vocabulary we have used to describe God. Perhaps part of what attending to the Sacred Feminine offers us is a gender-expansive image of the Divine.
Guanyin means ‘One who hears the cries of the world’. She is described as the ‘living expression of loving compassion.’ She is sometimes depicted as having 1000 arms in order to respond to the many needs of the world: she is one who relieves suffering and does not fall into despair.[2] In some depictions she carries a scholar’s scroll and her hands are positioned in a mudra or gesture that represents the teacher. She is also depicted sitting on a lotus, holding her hands in the posture of meditation, one who is wise.
Guanyin’s stories suggest the Sacred Feminine might be one who is compassionate, one who is responsive, one who is scholarly, one who is a teacher and one who invites us to wisdom, inviting us to sit, to rest our hands in contemplative posture and practice.
Central to Christian spirituality is the idea of the Imago Dei, that all humans are made in the image of God. To consider the Sacred Feminine is to be curious about those whose lives and experiences fall outside of what we have traditionally described in our names for God and the attributes ascribed to ‘him’. Childless women are made in the image of God.
Those whose gender falls outside of traditional binaries are also made in the image of God. When we take this seriously, when we are curious about what we might learn about the nature of the Divine when our images of God expand, then it becomes possible to experience more of the fullness of God.
Guanyin sits on my desk. She isn’t inviting me to be a Buddhist so much as returning me to this central Christian idea, inviting me to know in myself the image of God, and to see it in those I am called to accompany on their journey, whatever their gender or way of expressing that. She reminds me, over and over, of the Divine Compassion and the possibility of living my life and vocation from a posture of compassion formed in me by the grace, mercy and compassion of God. Thanks be to God.
[1] See, for example, Patrick Cheng, 2003, who says Nestorians in the seventh century and early Jesuits in China (16th century) made this analogy.
[2] David Jones, 2024.
Jemma Allen is a counsellor, spiritual director and supervisor living in Tāmaki Makaurau. She loves dogs, Mary Oliver, knitting and swimming. She has been a priest in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia for 25 years.
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.
