God the Father

We live at a time when the differences between men and women are often dismissed as purely cultural with the implication, or even assumption, that there is no real difference between them. Of course, anyone not indoctrinated by the deviations of modernity, originally inspired by forces seeking to separate Man from his Maker, knows this is nonsense but it is increasingly hard for people to stand by their intuitions when outwardly they are bombarded by propaganda from the media telling them that these are misguided and scientifically invalid. And not just the media for now the worlds of science and education have also both set their faces against spiritual truth. This, it must be emphasised, is a choice. It is not a rational or reasonable attitude, based on an objective interpretation of the universe. It is a deliberate decision to deny truth, if not at the lower, rank and file levels of those who follow where they are led, then certainly at the higher levels that actually run the show. There is an all out assault on spiritual reality at the present time and one of the ways this agenda is pursued is by the deconstruction of the human form. If two things as radically different as man and woman are regarded as basically the same then they are both cut off from deeper levels of their being, and their nature can be reassembled to specifically preclude any spiritual (or true spiritual as a false spirituality might well be added to the mix) content or awareness. In saying this I am naturally not disputing that men and women are both the same as human beings but I am upholding the reality of two different and complementary sexes and saying that this is all important as it reflects an archetypal and divine truth.

This is why I regard feminism as one of the major weapons in the contemporary war against God. It is a sad thing when something is presented as a good, and deceives many into thinking it is a good, but is actually the very opposite of that. I tend to believe that many of those who are deceived by this in fact want to be deceived as they feel that their personal agendas (and their egos) can be advanced by the deception. Nevertheless, even if they are willing victims, they are still victims. It might be countered that feminism has done much good by releasing women from their inferior roles and giving them opportunities they would never have had, but the good it may have done is now far outweighed by the harm it does as many women are derailed from their true vocation as women and denied access to the inner realities of femininity. In addition, the relation between the sexes is reduced from a loving complementarity to something that has become far more competitive. Besides, inferior role? That is a matter of opinion and rather presupposes the truth of the feminist doctrine in the first place. Obviously the past was far from perfect but it was an imperfect version of truth. We now are aiming for a perfect lie.

I say that feminism derails women from their true vocation as women for several reasons. Firstly, it gives them a false idea of themselves, of what they are and what they should be. It presents them with a distortion of their own reality. I see this very plainly as a man. It is an obvious truth (obvious in the light of the reality of God) which anyone should be able to see if their vision has not been clouded by worldly propaganda. Wise women should be able to see it even more clearly than me or any man. But so many women today can't see it or won't. And this brings me to the second point. Feminism cuts women off from their own source of inner wisdom. By emphasising traditionally masculine qualities and types of intellect, and promoting doing over being, it makes women think much more along analytical/mechanical lines and be far less open to intuition and direct perception as traditionally they always have been. Women are being trained and encouraged to become more like men and less like women. They can't ever fully succeed in this and they lose a lot by deforming themselves in the attempt to do so.

The inevitable effect of all this is that individuals live increasingly in a world of ideology and theory rather than reality and truth and, as a consequence, becomes increasingly alienated from reality and truth. What is more, women are no longer able to provide a harmonious counterbalance to men to the mutual advantage of both, and the whole of humanity suffers. If we ask why this has been allowed to happen when it is clearly counter to the reality of what human beings are, a reality happily accepted for as long as we know, the answer is twofold. One, it has been encouraged by the dark forces who have their own agenda of spiritual destruction and it has found a fertile soil in our time of materialism and egalitarianism. And two, it finds ready victims in people motivated by egotistical rebellion against God whether they perceive that in these terms or not. We should also not forget the truth in feminism because, of course, there is some. It would never have caught on if that were not the case, but half truths are often much more dangerous than outright lies.

I have taken rather a long time to come to the point of this post but I wanted to set the scene before doing so. The point is why is God called Father? Is this a mere convention or an accurate reflection of reality?  Is it a 'patriarchal' distortion of truth or does it really say something about the nature of the Supreme Being? I will affirm here that is a correct description of God as Creator, one based on reality, and that is why I had first to set out my case against the chief proponent of the idea that it is just a convention which could easily be changed.

I will start with the fact that Christ called God the Father. Now there are many different religions and all contain elements of the truth but that does not mean that all are equally true. Given that they are descriptions of spiritual reality and spiritual reality is a) vast, and b) capable of ever deeper interpretation, we should expect that. Religions either come from the experience of an initiating teacher as in Buddhism or from revelation and Christianity is the most recent revelation and the one that comes from the highest level. What about Islam, you might ask? Islam may have been chronologically more recent but it is really just a revamp of the Old Testament so it is metaphysically and spiritually less developed. The revelation of Christ, which includes the revelation of the Trinity, is the most profound revelation of spiritual truth humanity has received to date. I'm afraid you either see this or you don't and if you don't you might consider what is stopping you seeing it. Of course, you could have a preference based on various factors, birth and background particularly, and that is fine. God has sent different religions to suit different types of people and all (all within reason) have the power to bring you to him, I believe. Nevertheless, as I stated earlier, they are not all equal and Christ is the revealer of truth above all others, both in his teachings and, especially, in his person. I would also say that, though all religions have an understanding of the sacred, it is in Christianity that there is the greatest sense of the holy.

So the fact that Christ called God Father is important. He specifically referred to him in that way and, if you want to say that this was just a cultural matter, you have to explain why in so many other ways (including that of giving far more attention to women than earlier Jewish prophets or Judaism itself) Christ went against the cultural norms of his time. You also would be disregarding the essence of who Christ was and denying that he had any real insights into spiritual reality.

But that is just my starting position. If Christ said one thing and all the evidence pointed in another way that would create rather a large problem. But the fact is it all points in the same way. If you define God as unmanifest, unacting pure spirit beyond Creation, this is obviously above any qualitative expression or idea of masculine and feminine. But then there is nothing we can say about it at all. All words, all descriptions fall back at that threshold of naked unqualified existence. We can't even call it God because that is something and pure spirit is not something. But once we are talking about God as Creator, as something that acts and has a will, and, as beings in Creation that is what we must do, then we see that he is indeed best described as Father and that the language of fatherhood sums up the relation of the Creator to creation better than any other. For the name of God that most defines him is I AM. He is the supreme subject to which the whole of creation is object, and this takes us right to the roots of the masculine/feminine divide showing us that it is there at the beginning of manifested being where it reveals itself in subject and object. Now, clearly God is God and encompasses all things so some of his qualities can be described in feminine terms, but if we are talking about his essence rather than his qualities, and if we are describing him as the Creator then he is masculine for he generates creation whether that be ex nihilo or from a feminine aspect that he projects from himself - prime matter, the receptive substance. But, at any rate, creation is generated by God not incubated in him, and, although an aspect of him is within it, in himself he remains transcendent to it, outside of it. Similarly all creation is receptive to him and he is positive to it. Consequently although motherhood can certainly be used to describe some of the results of creation, it cannot be used of the initial and fundamental creative act.

None of this means there are not aspects of the divine being that can manifest in feminine form. I think there are and have written about it here. But the Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe is best understood as God the Father just as taught by Jesus and as demonstrated in a metaphysical sense by the fact that existence itself is, if it is anything, pure positivity.

To conclude, if considered as unexpressed being God is neither masculine nor feminine because there are no manifested qualities in unexpressed being at all. It is a state of complete inactivity. But when considered as the personal God and Creator he is masculine with the whole of Creation as his bride. And I am tempted to wonder whether this so called impersonal aspect is not just a creation of philosophers who have projected an idea in their heads into a reality. I don't dispute that something approximating to this exists but is it the absolute, as usually postulated, or is it just an aspect of the personal God that remains unexpressed, the ground of being for instance? That is to say, is it a part of him rather than him being a part of it? For if it were the supreme state how could the personal God ever have arisen? How could something have come from nothing or movement from immobility or light from darkness unless these things were already there or something was there to generate them?