In the Bible, Matthew 28:19 says - “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew%2028:19-28:19&version=31
It’s male, male, and male, isn’t it? Although some would argue that the Holy Spirit is more feminine in nature than the other two aspects of the Godhead. However, the entire Trinitarian doctrine - which I had been taught as pretty much the standard and core doctrine that defined the Christianity that I grew up with - just reeked of testosterone and chest hair everywhere. Even as a child who was raised in a home with a mother who stood her ground as a staunch feminist (I helped her stuff envelopes as a girl during the ERA campaign), and then being driven to church every Sunday to hear about Jesus the man this and God the Father that, and the gospel according to John the man elsewhere…..it was no wonder that my mother held fast to her love for Mary the Mother of God.
I was one of the only girls in my neighborhood in my youth, and despite the fact that I adapted to it well by playing along with their games of wiffle ball, snowball fights, and making skid marks in driveways with our bikes - I yearned for a feminine sort of deity to at least complement my views of what is divine. It was always a given……..God was divine. God was the Father. God is a “he”.
And even after more progressive interpretations of Biblical scripture became more popular with appointing a gender-neutral stance on God as neither he or she (I guess God was an androgyne now?), there still remains that Jesus, the only begotten son of God, was a “he”, too. And Jesus was divine.
Point being - Woman was not, is not, and never will be divine. It was never drilled into my head directly per se, but the suggestion was always a strong one. The purpose for woman was to be man’s helper, his mate, a vessel for procreation, and I ultimately came to the emotionally crumbling conclusion that no matter how materially important I was as a woman, I must accept that “man” was made in God’s image.
That was hell. Trust me. I had a brain, but it was never by definition a model for what I felt God was most pleased with. Living with the notion that I was nothing but a second-rate male left me with an inner rage that I could only feasibly channel in one direction if I wanted to remain compassionate to others. I channeled that rage inward and began a long period of self-loathing. Basically, what could I celebrate about being a woman, really? Honestly?
[sarcasm]Oh goodie! Maybe I can finally meet a man who will validate my self-worth![/sarcasm]
Misogyny is oftentimes a slow and compounding disease, and in my case this was exactly what happened. My descent into the horrid self-loathing kind of depression wasn’t the result of one or two traumatic instances as a young woman - it was the result of that last straw that broke the camel’s back. A hatred of all things feminine from the Bible to reading Shopenhauer to Barbie dolls that say that “math is hard” and surprisingly even to women who despise dresses…….what was left was an empty shell with a uterus, and subcutaneous fat in miraculously the “right” places that defined an hourglass figure.
My mind, my sexuality, and my dreams? Ultimately, they are secondary. It was atrocious living day to day trying desperately to cope with this situation.
Ladies, it does NOT have to be this way. I hope to point out that we do have our trinity right here in this world, and as an archetype that we can aspire to……And we can even find gratitude for our menses (*snort* I know, bear with me). This wisdom can be divined from the three stages that we live through in a relatively short amount of time for the first 50 years of our lives.
Mother - Maiden - Crone………Father - Son - Holy Spirit
My purpose at the moment is not to somehow show that major doctrinal study was ripped from the three personas that women mostly experience naturally. But to parallel for the sake of feminine sanity that we DO have a model in our relationships with not only the other women in our lives but with our own selves, too.
More to come…..
The roots of misogyny run much deeper into our cultural and psychological past than Christianity does. The shift from feminine deities, and the co-opting of vital fertility symbolism in the male form goes back millennia before Jesus came along, and tends to be a constant wherever large organized civilizations, with their linear histories, appear.
Yep, before the advent of X-ianity, nearly all civilizations were primarily matriarchal and focused on feminine deities;
femininity was accepted as a precious and divine principle because, after all, it was women who possessed the mystical and magical “power” (what we now know to be biological) to perpetuate the species.
And, weren’t the witch-trials of the inquisition also primarily a way for the church and patriarchal governments to remove “power” from the hands of midwives/healers in order to make their subjects more dependent/subservient to said patriarchal power structures?
I’m just guessin’.
This is not to say that humanity has not benefited in many ways from the changes that came with the patriarchal-shift (i’m thinking of scientific, technological, medical advances that came from the academic/civic institutions that were originally church-based),
but one certainly has to wonder if the benefits that resulted couldn’t, and SHOULDN’T, have been achieved much less brutally regarding the heartless trampling of so many weaker civilizations…
Though it is also important to point out that the raped indigenous/pagan/matriarchal cultures were never quite immune to violence themselves, as much as we’d like to believe in the ‘good old days’ of peaceful naked pagans dancing in firelit wooded groves and gently worshipping she-deities…there were always female war-gods, too. Brutal bunch of bitches, god bless them all…
That’s a very good point, Brendan, and I agree with you. For now, I wanted to focus on the influence of the Trinity concept in religious teachings, and especially how it affected me.
LOL jane….I love your feistyness. It’s obviously something I identify with.
It’s extremely interesting to see the devolution of feminine deity worshippers and the eventual scrapping of them completely from myth and culture.