Friday, October 2, 2015

God's Pronoun

When I walked out onto my patio this evening at the behest of Mr. Boo for a little after-dinner ball, I swept my arm across the forest twilight and the glassy, violet ocean and said "Mr. Boo, this is no accident. This is the work of God." I just can't imagine how such magnificence, such peaceful, serene beauty could be anything else but a gift from the creator and I would have sung allelujah from the mountaintops had not Mr. Boo dropped a muddy tennis ball in my lap.
Writing or even talking about God can be tricky for those that aren't literal subscribers to the Bible. Subscribers will refer to God with male pronouns: "Him", "He", "His", since it's spelled out that out that God made man in his own image, then woman was fashioned out of Adam's rib. So God, as the story goes, must be male just like his nemesis, Satan.
There is a reactionary camp that insists that God is a female, but since that's not the accepted  Biblical story, the idea that the creator is a mother (certainly more believable than a male creator) has not gained much traction. Satan, in this model, is man incarnate.
Then there's the remote yet logical possibility that God is neither male or female, or has anything resembling human characteristics whatsoever. God is the force responsible for the existence of love and the creation of everything good, and not much else. Satan is simply what happens when God's force is drowned out by the noise of human greed.
So what is the pronoun one uses when referring to this force, greater than anything any human can comprehend, with a love so pervasive, free and eternally available that the average Joe is apt to hide under the sofa in it's presence. In the absence of the Biblical structure, how does the believer correctly refer to God when "him", "her", and "it" won't do?
I guess if I had the answer I wouldn't be asking the question. Even the chronic wiseass, he who might dismiss death itself with a wave of the hand, a flippant comment, a clever aside, a quote from Mr. Boo and other wiseguys that would only incriminate him - even such dorks would, at the end of the day, like to get the grammar right.
So, which is it?



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