During the discussion, one of the folks around the table started chatting about the very first chapter of the book. It being a book about the Lord's Prayer and all, it tracks through that ancient prayer phrase by phrase, and the very first phrase is "Our Father." Pater Hemon, in the Greek of Luke 11 and Matthew 6, although without the italics or capitalization, because common Greek didn't roll that way.
One of the participants, an Older White Gentleman, had something to say about that. "I was struck," he said, "by that first chapter about fathers." "I didn't think," he continued, with a mischievous grin on his face, "that we were allowed to use that word any more."
This, I will confess, did occur to me in the writing of the book.
It is the strong preference of my comrades in the Presbyterian People's Front to avoid male pronouns in the evocation of God. Growing up in a very progressive church, this would typically manifest in prayer language that either centered the divine feminine or attempted to avoid gender altogether.
There's a strong and relevant truth to all of that effort, because YHWH ain't a male bipedal hominid. We're not talkin' Zeus here, not some towering white bearded dude in a robe glowering down from His Obviously Anthropomorphic Throne. Theological assumptions of male dominance or superiority rising from that language aren't to be tolerated.
I steer away from the use of gendered language to describe God myself, truth be told, and at no point in the book do I ever refer to God as "He." Not even in the chapter where I talk about God the Father. Not even once.
I also don't mind if folks want to use other terms to describe God. So many other words and images point to the Divine Nature. God is Love, of course. And Light. And a Consuming Fire. If Scripture's cool with God being like a mother hen with sheltering wings, or telling us the Creator of the Universe can manifest as an incandescent shrubbery, then all bets are off. You do you.
So in that spirit of inclusivity, I'm not of a mind to abandon the use of the word Father in prayer, because it, um, works. It ain't inherently broke. Is it perfect? No. Of course not. No human language, none, can bear the full weight of God's reality. We could theologically wordsmith until the end of time, and still not fully capture it. Our efforts to use our categorical semiotics more precisely just ends up creating a muddled, clumsy tangle.
Were I to reword the prayer to my own heretical idiosyncracies, I'd be forced to acknowledge that "Our Numinous Omnipassible Multiversal Panentheist Reality Engine" just doesn't flow off the tongue.
Father isn't that. It's not an academic abstraction. It's a concrete, actual, material relation that's comprehensible on a human scale.
And we human beings, with our propensities for overcomplicating our lives? That can be helpful.
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