God as Goddess

As a cradle Catholic, I was taught from the beginning to imagine God as male. It was written right into the prayers of the liturgy--we prayed to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. (The Holy Spirit was deemed to be male, too.) Jesus called God "Abba," which can be translated, "Daddy." Scripture was littered with male pronouns for God. That God was male was so obvious that I never questioned it.

But then, one day, I did question it.

And after a couple of years of questioning it, I tried out praying to God using feminine pronouns--just for the Holy Spirit, mind you, but when I got to the Holy Spirit in my recitation of the creed, I said "she" with gusto.

And after I left conventional church altogether and founded a house church for myself and my daughters, I abandoned masculine pronouns for the first person of the Trinity and began to refer to her as Thea. I began to refer to Jesus Christ as Sophia Christ--God's holy wisdom, who in the Old Testament is personified as female. And the Spirit? She remained a she to me.

Now my God is my Goddess. I appreciate the traditions that imagine God as male--God is not limited by my imagination or anyone else's--but those traditions are no longer mine. Now I choose to embrace the divine feminine, allowing Goddess traditions such as Wicca to inform my own Goddess imagery. My Christian faith is no longer conventional, but driven by an intense desire to know Amma, Thea, Goddess.

Do you--can you--imagine God as Goddess?