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Why God Created Women

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Growing up in what I realize now was a rather conservative culture, windows into female sexuality were pretty limited. I never saw a woman lead worship though I heard plenty of soprano solos, which I assumed was what a woman should sound like. My chocolate contralto felt odd and out of place. I didn't know any women with male friends without brow-furrowed conversations about boundaries and inevitable temptations. I wondered if I should question the profoundly nourishing relationships I had built over the years with members of the opposite sex. I have distinct memories of quilted Bible covers, Proverbs 31 plaques, and row upon row of books about praying women, strong women, bad women, beautiful women?you get the picture. All of these things fit neatly into Category A.

Then there was my mother: confident, beautiful, sensual, and ambitious. Mom knew which rules to break and which rules to bend if you wanted to get ahead. I often felt like a sloth in light of her clear-cut goals and pragmatism. The first woman to attain an executive management position at a luxury hotel in our city, she was a leader in a man's world. She was not afraid to use her beauty or her brains to move ahead. As a young girl, I remember watching the tender parts of her become calloused as she maintained what people called a "man's perspective" in business. It was here that I established Category B.

I went through a few years of trying to squeeze all the parts of me alternately into the two different categories and, in both scenarios, felt like a cheap copy of myself. My journals were filled with dark-inked entries wondering why God would create women to be fiercely intelligent if we couldn't lead outside of our seemingly innocuous circles. Why create women to be beautiful if we either must become resigned to being dis-integrated visual objects or be afraid of our bodies because of the "natural" temptation of the female form? Why create women to be the completers of his greatest creation if relationships with men were dangerous and tainted by our nature? I was angry. And I felt fiercely alone.

And then my (male) friend and high-school-buddy-turned-Catholic-priest encapsulated my frustration. "You've had the differences between male and female drawn out for you with the two distinctions existing in black and white. You can't live with yourself by the world's standard of femininity, yet you are convinced you must be distinctly female by the church's definition and you must worship a God who is distinctly male by the same code."

It was like feeling a wound for hours and then finally seeing the damage in the light. Yep, that'll need stitches.

God-as-man felt far away to me, and in many of the still-frames of my life, it even felt dangerous and oppressive. Yet I still had enough orthodoxy in me to cringe at the idea of God-as-neuter or the possible sacrilege of God-as-woman. So where could I find a doorway into my own sexuality and spirituality when all of the mirrors felt so foggy?

I'd been reading through the writings of the prophets for years, but almost stumbling. That's how I missed out on the framework that would have freed me. It wasn't the sum of my categories that was wrong - it was the fact that the categories even existed. To define sexuality, mine or God's, by a list of characteristics and behaviors was limiting my experience of myself and my experience of God; and, as a result, my ability to engage with God's work in the world.

The prophets saw this. They were the mouthpiece of a God described as a mother, as a lover, as a risk-taker. They embraced the mystery that God couldn't fit into our pre-designed social categories for gender. This seems so much harder for us. We love our boxes and the chance to say, "See, I fit inside this box. Therefore, I am feminine." We are created in God's image, our minds, bodies, our feminine essence. This is the beauty of mystery. And this is the challenge we face as women of God. Are you ready to take the risk?

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Posted by Caryn Rivadeneira on September 2, 2008 1:31 PM

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