Monday, May 12, 2025: We have to find a way to recognize, to fall in love with, and to trust the feminine face of God.

Most people first experience unconditional love not through the image of a man, but through the image of a woman—in most cases, their mother. It seems that for much of the human race, the mother is the one who first parts the veil and allows us to glimpse what love is, through experiences of grounding, intimacy, tenderness, and safety—things that most of us associate with God at God’s best. 

One of the disappointing things I have witnessed as a priest and spiritual director is how many people operate from the opposite of that—from a toxic and negative image of God. Nothing wonderful and nothing transformative is ever going to happen as long as that’s the case.  

One of the reasons I started to do men’s work was because I realized that an awful lot of people didn’t experience, expect, or trust that beloved relationship through the masculine. The more cultures I traveled to around the globe, the more convinced I became of the universal nature of what I call the father-wound. It seems to be a wound that many people cannot break through; they don’t expect love to come from that place.  

Author Shannon K. Evans considers the importance of allowing both masculine and feminine qualities in our experience of God: 

The feminine elements in God are an important balance to the masculine ones. If all we have known of the divine is God the Father, we are walking with a spiritual limp, yes, even those of us who were lucky enough to be raised to see “him” as loving and tender rather than aloof or stern…. 

The masculinity of God is not the culprit here. Imaging God as male is valuable and good for our spiritual selves…. But left unbalanced, a belief in a God who is exclusively male can lead us down a road of legalism, perfectionism, fear, self-criticism, and a plaguing sense of unworthiness. Sadly, many of our religious experiences have been marked by such things.  

On the other hand, when we integrate the divine feminine into our understanding of God, we find we have an easier time internalizing compassion, inclusivity, radical acceptance, justice for the outcast, and unconditional love. In my own life the divine feminine has offered me a maternal invitation to rest and be present. After a lifetime of assuming that striving and sacrifice would always be required for my spiritual growth, this was good news indeed. [1]  

Richard concludes:  

Whoever God is, God is somehow profoundly revealed in what it means to be feminine and masculine—both! But in our time, we have to find a way to recognize, to fall in love with, and to trust the feminine face of God. Most of us were not given that face in our churches, although we Catholics resolved it in an ingenious way through Mary. She, for many people, has become the accessible, trustworthy, and safe face of God.