It makes me feel like we are children playing with dolls. Here is the mommy, here is the baby and here is daddy whom we obey and who punishes us when we are bad. Isn't that a rather limiting concept? I like to think that the Grace which generates healing and love is a bit more universal, resplendent and powerful than that.

Do I believe that the Holy Spirit manifested as a human man 2,000 years ago and showed us a perception which expanded our earth-bound senses? Yes. For humans to incarnate, we have to come up with either a male or female body. I believe the Holy Spirit could just as easily be a female and in many cases has and still does reveal itself as exactly that. The point is, Spirit itself is universal, so the gender of the vessel it travels in is not even relevant.

Once again, we are feeding earthly values into our understanding of the Divine. When we do this, such values become as transitory and vulnerable as we humans are.They are further interpreted and reinterpreted by more humans who all have different earthly interests. They become superficial symbols to represent whatever a person's own self interest is at the time. Therefore, we are back into the mire of fleshly helplessness from which the Spirit came to set us free.

Gender is a superficial aspect of an entity, almost an afterthought. Maleness (testosterone) does not even inhabit the fetus until after the fourth week of development. Our biological system is set up so that we need two opposing sexes to produce a zygote from which the fetus starts to multiply itself. End of story about gender. It has nothing to do with the soul, with the spirit, with the capacity to love, with the goodness, energy and power of the Holy Spirit. The latter is exempt from such a very carnal aspect of being.

Personally, I don't feel comfortable with God having a penis any more than I do with God using a toilet. Also, there is no need for God to go around procreating a bunch of little offspring Gods. I understand that the notion of a mighty loving Source needs to be compared, at times, to a concept that is recognizable. It is like feeding strained food to a baby, it is reaching people at their level of understanding. Fair enough. But are we really that creatively impaired? Can't we conceive of a force more closely related to what it really is?

The Christians have always been hung up on male supremacy, so it makes sense that they would push the idea of God being a male. (Notice that the human, perishable, fleshly aspect of Christ is contributed by the woman.) I understand that for their particular culture at the time of incipient Christianity, the patriarchal society was considered to be most preferable. Okay. But here we are talking only of a social configuration. We are not talking about the Spirit which moves and breathes in us and in all living and non living things. We are talking about the energy which we know before we even incarnate, and which we will know after our incarnation has run its course. That seems vast and awesome to me. It seems greater, more nurturing, more loving, more dependable and more present than the human male or female ever will be.

But maybe that is just my own opinion.