I grew up with Christianity. My roots are a mixture of Danish Lutheranism and the Catholic catechism. I was baptized Lutheran but converted to Catholicism by the time I was 18. The understanding that God is male and all-loving was pretty solid in both traditions. Not only was God gendered but so was, of course, his son and the third member, the Holy Ghost. One could have hoped for a female gender representation for the Holy Spirit, but you have to go south of the Mediterranean sea to find acceptance of the Holy Spirit being female. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the spirit has a feminine pronoun and is called Shekhina. The Greeks left it neutral but Syrian Christianity in the Gnostic writings holds on to the feminine, as stated in the Gnostic acts of Thomas:
Holy Dove that bearer the twin young;
Come, hidden Mother;
Come, thou that art manifest in thy deeds
and dost furnish joy and rest for all that are joined with thee;
Christianity moved north and away from the Mediterranean countries early on, and in the King James version, in the New American bible as well as in German speaking countries, the Holy Spirit is a he! This leaves us with three male gendered God-images of the Christian faith. On the margin of all this masculinity is the image of the Holy Virgin Mary, although she is definitely not a part of the Trinity. The most common imagery we have of the Trinity is that of three male figures or of two men and a bird! I’m not sure how to relate to that image. Somehow I find the latter a bit comical without trying to be sacrilegious.
As a child, I always wondered who God’s wife was. I still do. How could God be gendered? How could the constellation of the Trinity be all male? How could Jesus not be allowed to have a wife and why was the Holy Spirit a he? It is no wonder that the Inquisition had free hands when they started burning women on the stakes before and after the Reformation. The last woman to be judged a witch in my own country was burned at the stake as late as 1693. She was a farmer’s wife and her name was Anne. The male dominated faith of Christianity turned out to be disastrous for the female gender as well as for the male. Why this need to gender your god in the first place? What is the point other than domination? Kenneth l.Becker quotes Jung in his book "Unlikely Companions" P21, Quote: The Christian eta has thus necessarily developed its doctrinal notions of the all-good God, the all-masculineTrinity, the archetypal moral hero and savior Christ. End of quote. Even Jung knew that the overwhelming masculinity of the Christian Deities was a set up for humankind. The gods of the European antiquity were often hermaphrodites. Agdistis, Aphrodite, Tiresias, The bearded goddess from Cyprus, and in Asia, Lan Caihe as well as Ishi Cori Dome, the transgendered Japanese deity who brought the sun into the world.
If it were the case that Christianity at some point had reversed its course and had reinstituted the feminine at the same level as the masculine in its God image, it would be comforting and make sense. Unfortunately, this is not the case. We are still in 2016 and dealing with a Trinity of all male expression and concretization which will continue to devastate the relationship between the sexes and the gender pattern we live by. How can the universal feminine come into balance with the masculine when the image does not exist in our God (Gods)? I live with a schizophrenic relationship with this all male religion which has shaped my beliefs for a whole life. I feel a certain powerlessness and deep sadness that this is so. My only refuge is in the Jungian study of depth psychology which opens a door for me to a genderless numinous. Or as Marie Louise Von Franz express it, that which brings us to our knees is God! Not as a he or a she, but as a genderless numinous.
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