Yes, God does have a penis–and my God’s penis is far larger and more virile than your God’s penis, so there!

It must be twenty-five years ago, I had a person tell me that the character of my relationships with others reflected the character of my relationship with God, and probably defined His nature for me as well. This was not something I wanted to hear. Up until that point, it had been me and God against the world: we weren’t winning, we weren’t happy, but we had each other. LOL.
If my faith in God does not include love in all my affairs, then my God is neither omnipresent nor consistent (or I am having too many affairs). Until my God “matures” in my “becoming,” I need to refrain from idle boasts about Him. Better that I show my God, at my present level, than brag. The humanity of Jesus seems the hardest for Christians to grasp (and he DID have a penis).
For me, the entire Gospel is summed up in these words: Turn, and BECOME as a little child, a perpetual beginner and open vessel.

Thank you for a timely article. I, too, have struggled with and explored this issue. As an old feminist who turned against the religion I was raised with because God as I understood God to be in my early 20s seemed to me like a “male chauvinist pig” who hated women, thought they were good for one purpose only, and that is to bear male children. God seemed to punish Eve a lot more harshly than he did Adam, and even though they both took wrong advice to be disobedient, Eve from the Serpant and Adam through Eve, somehow it was always womankind held out to be the one who must be controlled lest she lead man astray.

In my early 30s I found I did need God in my life, and even though I had looked into eastern religions and admired many aspects of them and about Native American beliefs as well, I turned back to the God/Jesus/Holy Spirit version of spirituality I had grown up with. It was Jesus I liked the most about Christianity, and right at first little else. But I read the Bible for the first time in my life, and I read leaning on my own understanding (a no-no, I suppose), not the interpretation of a pastor or teacher. What I found was that often verses that were hurled at me to shame or control me were taken out of context and had nothing at all to do with the way they were used. I also found that Jesus never said any of the things that seemed so harsh, strict and unfair, that he was all fairness and love, and that he urged us to be likewise.

In reading Genesis, I came to the conclusion that God didn’t necessarily have a penis, and if he did, then he would also have to have a vagina, as scripture clearly says “male and female he created them in his image.” God has also used self-descriptive comparisons such as “like a mother hen, I will gather my chicks under my wings.”

Then there was Jesus’ attitude towards women; he treated females with equality every time one was in his presence. He said Mary had chosen wisely to sit and listen to him speak instead of laboring in the kitchen like Martha so busy with “women’s work” at a time when learning was a male privilege only. He often chided his disciples for not doing as well as women. When a woman with an “issue of blood” touched his hem, he told this “unclean woman” whom no one was to touch that her “faith had saved her” and she was cured. He stopped the stoning of the adulteress, and he treated the Samaritan woman with a “shady past” to go and spread the word, after asking her, this most despised, creature to pour him water. When asked about a woman who had continued to marry brothers as each one died and the next brother in line married her until she had been married seven times who would be her husband in heaven, Jesus said there is no marriage in heaven, no male or female.

So my conclusion based on these passages and others as well, is that God/Goddess is a spirit. The Bible was written in a time and culture where male dominance and the subjection of the female was the norm and to give the Almighty the reverence and respect they should, of course they would chose the male nouns; the female would have been out of the question. People often say God doesn’t change, that God is the same yesterday and today, and that may be true, but our culture has certainly changed over the centuries and so have our attitudes. When Paul began his arduous task of getting the First Church formally established, polygamy was the norm, and even though he suggested that a man in a leadership position should have only one wife, he didn’t say that men with several should divorce all but one. He also told men to treat their wives and their slaves kindly. This is because the culture saw those situations as the norm, and if he had said divorce all your wives and let your slaves go, these people would most likely have been without support and have nowhere to turn. Paul also said it was better to live like he did, totally devoted to spiritual issues, but it was better to marry than to burn, which suggests to me that marriage wasn’t ideal but better than those burning hormones distracting you to the point of non-control. So when people say our values do not change, they are actually very incorrect. Our values and perceptions have changed a great deal since the preachings of the First Church, and I imagine they will continue to change as our understanding and scientific knowledge change. Jesus left us with three basic commands– To love God with all our hearts, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and to love one another as he loved us. If we are doing that, really doing it, instead of saying things like “love the sinner, hate the sin” but truly loving, I believe that these burning questions would no longer be so important and we would come to that loving and harmonious understanding of the humane people Jesus urged us to be.

The sub-conscious in us all is the puppet-master: what we most often think of as choice, is an echoed command from below…righteously and unflinchingly followed. Any motivation is an impurity. All motivations are so diluted and delusional that our grandest intention is no more than lurking vanity.

Yet this cycle can be broken–and that is the deeper purpose of the Twelve Step Path. To realize this purpose usually means slow torture, the steady and nearly unrelenting “necessary suffering” that comes with self-realization. There appears to be no “easier and softer way.” A good 6th and 7th Step translates, usually, into the very worst time of our lives.

Everything about life is left up in the air and the only thing that we know for sure is how badly we acted. All certainty about the sacred and profane is gone. All comforting support to faith and being is stripped away. The next moment becomes so entirely unknown and strange that we do not have the mind or will to venture a guess. The ground beneath our feet has given way to an unfathomable abyss. We hover, aloft in ambiguity and ambivalence, still only from unknowing. And “unknowing” is the home of the soul.

Many are discouraged from remaining in this place, the well-intentioned throwing ropes, deploying boats, coming in helicopters to take us from this obvious “bad place” to the safe shore of Reason, Tradition, and Principles. Evil seems to be underfoot and gaining yards, so why not desperate measures. A soul appears ready to be lost. And it is, but not in the way assumed.

Unless intimately experienced, we tend to think it is “alcoholism raising its ugly head”; “the ego looking to take back control”; “faith assaulted”; “the failure to properly work this ‘simple program.’” All lies…if we have truly reached the threshold point of fundamental transformation. That point is free-fall.

“Good is enemy of the best.”

We all tirelessly and always work for good, as one’s perceptions dictates. It is in breaking this cycle of our estimation of doing “the next good or right thing” that salvation finally comes.

Nothing that is truly new can be understood by a consciousness that looks to compare, measure, and weigh it by past experience, study, or text books. Give a TV to a caveman and it is firewood or a cutting tool, once broken. The incomprehension of this movement of the soul is similar.

Jerry Lynch, I don’t get what your comment about perceptions and the Twelve Step Program have to do with the subject at hand, that being the sexuality of God, and is God/Goddess just a spirit or does he/she have an actually physical body and only one sex. Could you tie the question in with your comments to make a little more sense in the context of the original question.

Thank you.

It all comes down to how we see and interpret. We all have filters. a generous dose of worldliness that can blind or impinge clarity of the spiritual. So many of us decide on truth long before we have any clue what it looks like or how to recognize it. Or we go on a search without the equipment for discovery, thinking we are naturally equipped to realize something totally alien to our experience and education. Funny, but really tragic.
For me, the questions cannot be approached directly; the answers are not in what I find but.what finds me: divine providence after my complete abandonment out of desperation, frustration, loss, failure, or disillusionment. These “awful mercies” of God help restore my vision, because I am left with no choice but trust in him, or where I needed to be all along.