Your God is Way Too Small

How big is the God you believe in? Is He the size you can keep on a shelf in your library? You can take Him out now and then and contemplate who He is. Maybe He is the size of the sanctuary of your church. You can go and visit Him now and then and be taken in with the size and grandeur of the building He occupies. Perhaps, your God lives in nature and He is the size of the ocean or the mountain ranges--you can visit Him there and see how vast He is. Maybe your God covers the whole earth and you see Him in everything. If you have a really big God, maybe He fills the whole known universe. Just trying to understand that boggles your mind.

No matter what size your God is, He is way too small. The problem with trying to understand God is that we make Him into something we can comprehend and understand and in doing this, we make Him small. In the Hebrew tradition, God was so big, so indefinable, that His name was not spoken. YHWH was like a whispered breath.

God describes Himself in Exodus (3:14) when He appears to Moses as I Am that I Am. The Genesis account of creation says that YHWH created man in his image, male and female, so that even referring to God in the masculine makes Him/Her too small. He is not just He but He and She. How do we begin to understand the Source of All That Is, let alone have a name that describes the Sacred Them—the Divine Male/Female?

Jesus demonstrated the feminine heart of God when He stood over the city of Jerusalem and wept. His words are the words of a tender mother longing to nurture and protect her children. “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills God’s prophets and stones God’s messengers! How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings, but you wouldn’t let me.” (Matthew 23:37)

We are so accustomed to defining God in the masculine that we have ignored the feminine qualities of the Source of Life. Yet, who is it that gives birth to life on this earth, but the feminine? Is it possible that the creative aspect of God is the feminine force of life? Again, in the Genesis account of creation it refers to the Spirit of God (shekhina) hovering over the face of the earth. The shekhina is the feminine aspect of God.

By seeing God as only one-sided, as masculine, we have denied and wounded the feminine side of every creature. We have wounded the feminine by ignoring Her in the Godhead. We have wounded Her because we have ignored Her existence and power in our own lives. If we cut off the creative force and power of God within us, how can we ever be truly redeemed? How can that which has been lost, be found and restored and empowered?

To begin to understand, where do we begin? How do we reclaim that which we have neglected for centuries? Deep within our collective unconscious is a wound crying to be healed—a part of humanity longing to be restored. Its neglect is evidenced in the lack of nurturance we observe between humanity, our neglect of the earth, and the violence that ravages our planet. It is witnessed in our relationships with ourselves and with each other. Where is the Divine Feminine within us that will give birth to new ways of thinking and acting?

It is not found in feminism, for feminism has tended to be another form of unilateralism. It amplifies the feminine while excluding the masculine. It is not in patriarchal traditions, because they amplify the masculine, while ignoring the feminine, or subjugate it to a minor role. It is probably best observed in what we consider more “primitive cultures”, such as Native American traditions, where the masculine and feminine are both honored within both genders and the importance of each is integrated into the society and the individual person.

So to begin to heal, requires an acknowledgement that I/we are wounded. It requires opening our hearts and souls to the feminine aspect of God and beginning an exploration of our creative natures. Love has amazing healing qualities. Divine love re-creates. Re-creation at its best is time spent restoring a sense of wholeness and completeness within us. That is why we so often choose our recreation activities outside in the vastness of Creation. I believe it inspires the feminine within us and calls to our souls to awaken to All That Is within our Being. It is only when we recognize the vastness of God, that we begin to comprehend the awesomeness of the Divine living within us. Allowing oneself to be filled up with the beauty of All That God Is, submitting to Divine love, embracing our whole selves, masculine and feminine--it is here, in this new paradigm, that we will start to understand how to heal our planet, ourselves, and our relationships.