God - An Ecofeminist Approach

God: An Ecofeminist Approach To The Greatest of Mysteries

Ivone Gabara
Longing For Running Water: Ecofeminism & Liberation
Chapter 3

God: An Ecofeminist approach to the Greatest of Mysteries

  1. ​Relatedness as a Language and an Experience of the Divine
  2. Issues Raised about Ecofeminist Discourse on God
  3. God: Models and Mystery
  4. God: My Hope

Understanding God as

    "Person"
     "Ground of Our Being"
     "Relatedness"
     "Sacred Body"

"The model of the Universe as God's Body ... everyone and everything becomes potentially a sacrament of God ..."

"The model of the Universe as God's Body ... everyone and everything becomes potentially a sacrament of God ..."
"Relatedness as the mysterious reality of God is, … to affirm that God is not a pure essence existing in itself;
rather God is relationship."
"We no longer speak of the presence or absence of God, but basically, of
presence"

Issues Raised about Ecofeminist Discourse of God

  1. Can't accept the idea God is not a person.​
  2. Can't pray to an energy flow.
  3. Must not fall into Pantheism.
  4. Ecofeminist fails to stress God committed to poor.
  5. What do we do with biblical images of God?
"Why has the male God of life
so seldom condemned these horrors?
"I think it is of fundamental importance to avoid putting the authority of the Bible over that of life.
... Our life experience is our first teacher."

God: Models and Mystery

"all that we say about God is an approximation, a model for expressing our perplexed grasp of the mystery that envelops us."

God: My Hope

"... because our wager in this fragile life is a wager against all hope."

"... I continue to cry out for the Greatest of Mysteries.

Therefore it cries out in me as a power that is both within me and outside me, as a last hope even when I perceive that there is no hope..."

dethrones humanity ... and relocates us...

within the welcoming Mystery that envelops us and makes up the being of all beings."
"We are moving into a different cosmology, a different anthropology, and a
different theology."
"Despite its goodness, this is a tragic divinity."
"...barely an anthropocentric God."

"This is one of the tasks ecofeminism has set for itself."

"... to consider other images of ourselves and the mysterious reality we call God."
"Opening ourselves to other points of view and in some senses
moving beyond mere human suffering."
... "to be" ...
... links everything with everything and everything with all."
"... learning to think of ourselves in categories that are no longer oppositional
but rather inclusive."

Ecofeminist God Discourse Issues

  1. ​idea that God is not a person.
  2. can't pray to an energy flow
  3. pantheism ... must not fall into
  4. The poor need concrete images of God
  5. fails to stress a God committed to poor.
  6. What do we do with biblical images of God?
I read Gabara's response as something like
20th century lived experience itself has raised these questions and pushed aside the old constructs.
"...the church ... needed God's authority ...
in order to wield power and exact obe-dience . "

"could the ... concrete image of God ... really be the preservation of a masculine image of the deity,

somehow mitigated by the figure of a patriarchal mother ... ?"