Gender and Spirituality
From the very beginning, gender has made a huge impact on how we see religion and spirituality and has led to judgment, bias and imbalance. If there is an all-loving God, or an eternal source of love and creativity then how could gender ever become an issue? Especially in formal religion, gender has been used as an excuse to separate people from spirit; surely, this has nothing to do with a true experience of God or spirituality.
To experience pure spirit one would realize that the extension of love and divinity cares little about our physical makeup! Thus, to use religion to dictate a bias toward the male energetic form is ridiculous; especially when one considers the emergence of light to come from a whole source. Even if the source has aspects, these aspects of divinity must be balanced. In the Old Testament, we see the emergence of light through the unspeakable name of God, the Tetragrammaton. This occurrence starts with an expansion and a reception, which has been taken to mean the expansion aspect to be first and therefore more important. This expansion is seen as male and suddenly we have a religious bias towards masculine energy. The feminine energy is thus seen as secondary and so we are left with thousands of years of prejudice and bias.
It is like pouring water from a jug into a glass and saying the water is the most important since it is first! Without the glass, the water is useless and the glass being filled occurs simultaneously with the pouring. How then, could Divinity be seen as masculine and only having a secondary feminine? The Universe does not work like that, balance is balance and to see the feminine aspect as inferior misses the whole point entirely.
Here then lies the problem with traditional monotheism; God is seen as whole and yet masculine. We therefore have an imbalanced whole, which is impossible, or we have a powerless, static singularity that is devoid of character. Wholeness is a completion, which would have to include all aspects of Divinity and the energies involved. This, at best, is seen as the male creative force with the feminine aspect reduced to reception only. It must be seen that the forces occur as one simultaneous whole, where one is no more superior to the other.
These may seem trivial points but when taken to extremes we see the appalling treatment of women based on religious dogma. This is witnessed when we see certain churches’ response to woman priests. To deny woman the right to follow their own religious path shows a clear lack of any spiritual experience; doctrine and ‘book learning’ are no substitute for direct experience of Divinity.
So let the balance be restored, let the bias towards masculinity within religion be stopped. Masculinity is not the problem; the bias is the problem and this religious bias has been the cause of much suffering for far too long.
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…does god have a willy? Well a male orientated religious view points gonna caste any anthropologically based visions of a divine sky ruler as male. That’s the trouble with the whole abrahamic thing, innit? Like wise a matriarchal ones gonna give it a womb. That’s the trouble with the whole gaia thing too….
It’s a yin and yang thing (obviously biased and fucked up ‘western’ interpretation that ‘creative’ ‘male’ is somehow ‘stronger’ than ‘passive’ ‘female’ not withstanding) . The only reason the ebb and flow, the yin and yang, the rising and the falling, is there at all is because the tao is moving through the whole. It’s all one continually changing river flowing on and on for ever. Every mountain has a dark side and a light side in the sunshine. The sun moves, the sides change, same mountain. All complex phenomena can be expressed as this, the interplay between opposing forces. There’s not a willy in sight….!