The Trickster is at Work with Opposing Perspectives on Gender!

"What a long, strange trip it's been. "
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The Grateful Dead​

Wow, what a crazy adventure life can be! Over the past month, I've been getting skewered in a few of my students' papers and by a Facebook reader for the "oppressive" binary I've "set up" between the "Masculine" and "Feminine" as two complementary aspects of the Divine, even after so carefully avoiding the terms "Male" and "Female" as advised by another student whom I wholeheartedly respect. (My God, I am SO sick of hearing the term "binary" used in a derogative sense to denigrate the polar energies of the universe!!)

Then, a funny thing happened. This weekend, I attended Scottish spiritual teacher John Philip Newell's workshop in Denver on Celtic Christian Spirituality at Iliff School of Theology, my old alma mater. In his lectures, Newell talked about how important it is to reclaim the tradition of the Sacred Feminine and also its corresponding energy embodied in the Sacred Masculine. He went on to say that Celtic Christian Spirituality has excelled in honoring the Sacred Feminine!
And then, a few hours later, my wife shared with me a passage from Kathleen McGowan's novel entitled "The Poet Prince," which she's currently reading for her women's book group. In that book, the author points out the idea that - based on the account given in Genesis 1:26a and 27 - God most certainly has a Goddess consort - named Sophia Wisdom. The text reads:
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"Then God said, 'Let us make humanity in our image, in our likeness . . . So God created humanity in his own image, in the image of God he created humanity; MALE and FEMALE he created them."

​Ha, ha, ha, ha! What a trickster the Source of the universe is: on the one hand putting me in an academic circumstance in which I agonize over the possibility of making a whole group of seekers feel excluded from the riches of Christian Mysticism, and THEN hitting me with these two weekend incidents which would seem to imply the complete opposite! Ha, ha! It is SO crazy!! Indeed - what a long, strange trip this past MONTH has been!"
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Photos: Desert Paintbrush, The Phallus, and Queen Nefertiti Rock, Arches National Park, UT; Ancestral Puebloan and Fremont Culture petroglyphs, near Moab, UT. All four photos were taken on April 23-25, 2016

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