God cannot be merely our Father

A version of this piece was published in the Independent on the 24th March 2001, under the headline ‘There is more to motherhood than apple pie’.

I greatly prefer the tradition of Mothering Sunday to the Americanism of Mother’s Day. The latter ‘appreciates’ a particular person, but the former honours a state of being. The logic of Mother’s Day is to institute a Father’s Day, too – and, while we are about it, why not something for Grandma? But the notion of ‘mothering’ has no parallel.

The iconography of our culture has reduced mothers and fathers to much of a muchness. Nowadays, neither parent is likely to see themself, or be seen, as the head of the household. The very concept of ‘wearing the trousers’ seems silly. Either may work or be out of work. Either – if it comes to this – may win custody of the children. Biology, too, seems to downplay any distinction, replacing the old image of the man planting his seed in the woman, like an acorn in the earth, with the more prosaic tale of two gametes entering an equal partnership as a zygote.

But if there is less and less to choose between dads and mums, there remains a world of difference between ‘fathering’ and ‘mothering’. How long, to put it crudely, does it take a man to father a child? Twenty seconds and a spoonful of semen if he’s quick and the woman and he are both fertile. Technology even allows him to do it without being present – or, indeed, still alive. And if a man does his bit on behalf of somebody else, he is not known as a ‘surrogate father’ but only has ‘donated his sperm’.

How long does it take a woman to mother a child? The minimum requirement is eight or nine months, but the notion of mothering is so expansive one might easily say 18 years, if not the rest of her life. And what does mothering require? Not one decisive act, nor even an uncountable succession of acts, but a chronic condition of giving. The protection of her womb, the nutrition of her blood and her milk are only the physical preliminaries. Tradition, if not something innate in the female psyche, expects a mother to be an inexhaustible well of self-sacrificial love.

These thoughts resurrect the question of how we should think of God. For conservative Christians, there is no debate: we are told to address God as ‘our Father in heaven’ not by some patriarchalist prophet in the Old Testament but by Jesus himself. Yet it is not merely political correctness that suggests that we should envisage God as our heavenly Mother.

If we ask why Jesus used the metaphor of father, we might come up with three good reasons. First, the ancient world believed that the man was the sole progenitor: his seed, like the seed of a plant, was already an embryo. It seemed apt to liken the Creator to a father, though not to a mother. Then, as the head of the household the man was both the provider and the proprietor. Like the home they lived in and the food they ate, his children belonged to him, and if in Jesus’ day he no longer had the power of life and death over them, his right to throw them out or to disinherit them amounted in practice to little less.

These three roles peculiar to men seemed obviously to parallel the roles of God as creator, sustainer and ruler of the universe. So the ancient Greeks saw Zeus as their Father, and so the Norse people saw Odin. The crucial qualification that the Jewish prophets made to the metaphor, which Jesus constantly reinforced, was that God is a father whose nature is to love.

Yet ‘loving-kindness’ (as the Book of Common Prayer calls it) is not essential to the business of fathering, or even typical of it. A rapist can beget a child as well as the next man, and there is nothing in the nature of creation per se that obliges the Creator to feel tender towards what he has made. Without the proviso that God is love, the image of a Father in heaven very easily breaks down into the conventionally masculine principles of will and act and judgement. It is striking that it is generally the devotion of a mother – even, in one instance, a mother hen! – that the Bible takes as the standard of love.

Meanwhile, as science and social change have combined to strip the man of his claim to be the author and arbiter of his family, it would seem that if anything it is the woman who better represents the divine. Creation is not the work of 20 seconds or even six days. To Christian minds, evolution presents a picture not of the decisive action of unopposable will but of a process that demands endless care. If God formed Adam out of the clay, he spent millions of years doing it.

Love, as the apostle Paul famously said, is patient and kind – but not only that: it does not envy or boast, is not proud or self-seeking, always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. And it leads to self-sacrifice. In recent years, theology has been uncovering the implications of God’s willingness to empty himself for the sake of the freedom and fulfilment of his creatures. This is behaviour that the accumulated experience of humankind has taught us to associate with women far more than men.

A favourite verse of my mother (as it happens) suggests something profoundly maternal: ‘The eternal God is your refuge,’ said Moses, ‘and underneath are the everlasting arms.’ God cannot merely father creation: his nature constrains him to mother it.

© The Independent 2001

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