God on the half shell

Scallops, oysters, clams, and mussels. Raw, steamed, Rockefellered, or grilled. You love them or you hate them. Today.

Dietary restrictions kept, and still keep, many from eating these little beauties, the oceans hoovers. Makes sense, who wants to eat a dust buster? But anything is better with butter, right? Or is that bacon? (Another restriction, dang!)

Back in the days when Rome ruled the entire known world, those crazy people held to the belief that the goddess Venus was born from the sea foam. She was almost always depicted on sea shells, scallop shells to be precise. The most common depiction we have of her comes from the renaissance painter Botticelli’s image known as the Birth of Venus. She was the goddess of love and grace, prosperity and abundance, no less.

Now I’m not one to quibble with descriptions of divinity but that moniker sure sounds a whole lot like the names and/or characteristics we’ve claimed Jehovah to be. 1 John was the first to tell us that God is love. Heck, John even said that grace came through Jesus. Except for the gender issue, it might be thought that Romans were closet Jews or something. (Before you get offended, that was a joke.)

In the book, The Shack, author Paul Young depicts God as a woman, a matter that has sent many straight-laced fundamentalist into the stratosphere (which, regrettable, at that height they could still not come back with an accurate description of God) claiming that this representation was completely inaccurate and misleading to the public. In their minds manliness is next to godliness. God created man first, woman came out of man; God charged man to protect the garden, the woman ate the forbidden fruit first. This is their first line of defense for the manly qualification of God’s gender.

Let me make this clear: The only gender I truly know about in the trinity is Jesus. I understand that the terms Father and Abba lend themselves to male role models, but if, according to Jesus, God is spirit, and, according to Paul, there is no such difference as male and female in the kingdom of God, it seems gender isn’t really as important as we want to make it out to be.

Consider this for a moment. We become what we worship. Men are often stereotyped as loners, aggressive to the point of becoming violent, authoritarian, domineering, aloof, capricious, terrible at communication and single-minded. Those attributes are pretty discouraging in humans but how often have we thrust those same characteristics on the interactions of God with us or humanity in general? Let’s not even go down the road of people who have had abusive husbands or fathers and how that dynamic gets transferred onto God.

The female stereotypes are well known too. Caring, nurturing, sacrificial, loving, and communal. Who cleans up the messes in our lives? Who feeds us, bathes us, tucks us in at night? Who tends to us when we’re ill, scrape our knees or elbows, fall off our bikes? Who does every athlete thank when their face is shoved in a camera? Who knows where everything is in the house and what everyone is doing, at the same time?

Is it safe to say that our stereotypical male model keeps us from accepting or believing God really is love when we recognize the characteristics of love to be more feminine in nature? Maybe we need to adjust our perceptions from a God who can leave us shell-shocked to a God on the half shell. IF the nature of divine justice is represented through beating, flogging and death then I’m not interested. IF the nature of divine justice is giving away something at any cost to retain me and the world, then I will have God on the half shell…with the bacon bits.