It is a tongue-in-cheek post designed to kill two birds with one stone.
1. I feel rather playful today. (Grasshopper, I am wearing 'blue' today :-)
2. CD, I know you belong to the Faith beginning and ending with the letter 'C'.
I also know you detest with great intensity all things 'Game'.
This strangely amuses me.
But... my guilty pleasures aside, I thought to myself: how can I make this a bit more palatable to her?
The answer came to me bizzarely enough on a Sunday:
Just add 'God'.
:-)
So here we are. Game-food for the uninitiated, with a few sprinkles of 'God' as 'relish'.
Buon appetito.
I see God as a man. Masculine. Male.
Whether I am picturing the 'brimstone and fire' old dude with the long white beard in the Old Testament or the 'hippy' type fellow with the long hair and sandals in the New Testament.
Both are undeniably male. I have no other versions of God in my head, except of course the abstract versions like the roaring thunder in a fierce storm depicting 'the wrath of God' (again, Old Testament-like) or the 'still small voice' during a gentle breeze over the lake on a sunny day (?New Testament).
Both are still masculine, in my eyes.
To digress a bit, there is some music I 'see' and not hear. Some composers really know how to depict 'rage' or 'wrath' that I can 'see' - good examples are Beethoven's 'Rage over a lost penny' and Sibelius' sultry, moody violin concerto. Both seem to be innocuous on the surface, and then when you 'see' it, you feel there might be no escape, like I imagine the 'Great Wrath' to be.
On the other hand, Beethoven especially is the absolute master at creating that 'still small voice' too.
Practically all of his symphonies' second movements are so gentle, you could almost imagine hearing God speak.
Something to do with his deafness perhaps? He did afterall live in a silent world.
This masculinity of God was always the traditional view of God.
Until that is, the feminists tried to get a foothold in the Church.
There was a time when there was a drive to change 'The Lord's Prayer' into 'Our Mother, who art in heaven'...
It didn't catch on.
Not in the Catholic church, at least.
For all the Catholic Church's sins, deviation from the Patriarchy is not one of them, unless I am grossly mistaken.
Unlike many other churches in christendom, the Catholic church refused to and still refuses to ordain women as priests. It refused to accord women certain powers as demanded by secular society (read: feminists).
And yet the Catholic church, to me, is one of the most 'woman-friendly' churches there is.
Why is this?
The Catholic church, since 1970, has begun to accord some of its highest honours to women. There are now three female 'Doctors of the Church' (St Theresa of Avila, St Catherine of Siena, St Thérèse de Lisieux - this last one is referred to as a 'Doctor of love'!) and there are many more on the list, being considered by Pope Benedict.
The Catholic Church has always placed a high importance on Our Lady. To an extent that some people outside the Catholic Church believe that Catholics 'worship' Our Lady. They therefore have confused the Church with a 'Matriarchy'.
If indeed Our Lady is a Matriarch, then it is only in the sense that she is the type who defers to the Patriarch.
She, afterall, was very quick to say "Thy will be done" when she was given the task of becoming mother to Our Lord. No easy task considering she was a young, unmarried but betrothed Jewish girl, and she lived in a society where if a woman was found to be pregnant outside of marriage, she was stoned to death, no questions asked.
According to the Catholic Church, Our Lady is the 'highest' of all the saints.
It is no secret that some Popes, like John Paul II adored her till his dying day.
I am pretty sure there will never be a woman Pope in the modern era.
But I am sure there will be no need.
Again, I wonder: why?
Do I need God to be 'female' to feel better?
Do I need to have a woman Pope to feel any more validated in this life?
Strangely, I feel the answer is 'no'.
But, alas I will never know. Because I have not experienced the above scenarios before.
But that's OK. I can live with that.
A woman does not need to be a 'leader' to be 'powerful'.
Because feminine power is an entirely different animal from male power.
It is less 'out there', but it is there, nonetheless.
You might miss it if you blink. But if you are looking for it, you see it.
Interestingly, speaking of composers above, I note there aren't that many female composers, if at all.
Why?
Afterall, there were many women authors from time immemorial.
What is the difference between the written word and a musical note?
So, because I see God as 'male', I sometimes correlate his 'behaviour' to that of men in general. This is done in jest, a kind of intellectual joke I play with myself.
If I need a prayer answered and I don't get what I want, I wonder, "Is God gaming me?"
If I ask God to intervene in my daily life and it doesn't quite happen in the way I envision, I think "Is God GHOW where I am concerned?"
If I don't seem to get an answer from him, I think, "Am I being negged?"
And then when he does do something nice for me, I secretly think, "Is he going all beta on me?"
And then he is back to alpha.
