Those Who Long for Her 12 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

As my husband slipped from consciousness under the power of the sedative going through his I-V line, I heard him mumble: “My soul, give thanks to our God, all my being, bless her holy name. My soul, give thanks to our God, and never forget all her blessings.”

I cringed, wondering what all the doctors, nurses, and techs standing around his Emergency Room bed would think at his praying to God as She. But they probably weren’t even listening, focused as they were on the multiple monitors he was hooked up to in preparation for the electric cardioversion that would shock his heart out of the arrhythmia that it occasionally goes into.

The procedure was successful, but my husband’s mumbling recalled me to the events that had led to our re-casting of Psalm 103 into a praise of She Who Is.

When theologian Elizabeth Johnson first published She Who Is in 1992, I bought the book, curious to see how this major scholar would write about re-conceiving God in feminine terms. But somehow I couldn’t get myself to read the book. I feared that opening myself to such a major re-conceiving of how I imaged God would confuse my prayer life. So I gifted the book to a feminist friend when she left her job on my parish staff.

I thought no more about the subject until 1995, when the Vatican issued a decree forbidding Catholics to even talk about the possibility of women’s ordination. Right after this decree came out, I got an anguished phone call from a young woman in my parish. “Is there any point in us women even staying in the church?” she asked in agony. Without a second’s thought I offered: “Let’s explore this with a group of your friends. How about our all reading She Who Is together, because Johnson is a brilliant feminist scholar who has chosen to stick it out in the church, in fact as a nun.”

And so began my reading of She Who Is, in the context of monthly discussions at my home with these five or six young women who loved their Catholic faith but who had never read theology. They were professionals in other fields: I recall a pharmacist, an art teacher, a banker, a physical therapist.

I browsed the book before we began our gatherings, and was impressed by Johnson’s talent of writing solid, technical systematic theology in a way that was accessible to the general reader. This was in fact her theological methodology as well as her thesis: that any language for God must come from our experience of God, and women’s particular experience of God had never yet been taken as the grounding for a theological work refocusing our understanding of the Trinity.

Out of my background as a literature professor, I “assigned” our little group’s women to come to each meeting with one favorite sentence or paragraph from the book that spoke to their personal experience.

As we moved through She Who Is this way, all animated by Johnson’s profound re-thinking of how God is imaged within the tradition of Trinitarian thought, we came to understand Johnson’s core point: that speaking of God as She is not a matter of simply changing pronouns but rather requires recovering images of God that surge up from women’s experience: images that are relational, non-hierarchical, nurturing; powerful in the sense not of power-over but of empowerment; strong in the sense not of military might but of moral strength.

Johnson also stressed recovering the scriptural divine feminine, particularly the figure of Wisdom (Sophia in Greek).

When our book-group came to an end, we had all been transformed. Most of the group decided to remain in the Catholic church, inspired by Johnson’s model of doing Catholic theology in a way meaningful to women. For me, the transformation was exactly what I had originally feared when first buying Johnson’s book, but which I now didn’t fear but gratefully embraced: a radical transformation of my prayer life. My husband and I had for decades prayed the daily Liturgy of the Hours, which draws heavily on the Psalter. But I could no longer pray to God as king or warrior. Nor could my husband, after he devoured She Who Is as soon as I’d finished it.

So we re-cast some of the psalms based on Johnson’s theology. Psalm 103 has always been one of our favorites, and all the more so since we’ve come to pray it as follows (I’m printing here only excerpts, since the psalm is long):

My soul, give thanks to our God,
all my being, bless her holy name.
My soul, give thanks to our God
and never forget all her blessings.
It is she who forgives all your guilt,
who heals every one of your ills…
God-Sophia is compassion and love,
slow to anger and rich in mercy.
Her wrath will come to an end;
she will not be angry forever.…
For as the heavens are high above the earth
so strong is her love for those who seek her.
As far as the east is from the west
so far does she remove our sins.
As a mother has compassion on her children,
God has pity on those who long for her;
for she knows of what we are made,
she remembers that we are dust.…
But God’s love is everlasting
upon those who cling to her name;
her justice reaches out to children’s children
when they keep her covenant in truth,
when they keep her will in their mind.
God-Sophia has filled heaven with her power
and her strength shines through all.
Give thanks to God, all her angels,
mighty in power, fulfilling her word,
who heed the voice of her word.
Give thanks to God, all her loved ones,
her friends who do her will.
Give thanks to God, all her works,
in every place where she dwells.
My soul, give thanks to our God!