God is not a boy's name
This mug was gift from the rector (a woman!) at St Mary’s Episcopal Church in Rockport, 30 years ago when I was a student at Gordon College. Attending that congregation and meeting with her, was a significant phase in my sloughing off Evangelical Christian culture and exploring a sense of the Divine more expansive than what that culture described… prescribed?... dictated - as in taking dictation and receiving indoctrination. This period coincided with my introduction to Feminism. I was reading novels by women, essays by women, and research by women. I came to imagine the Divine as having been plucked from a lush wild cosmos and contained in men’s words, like the character Bertha from Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea was trapped in Mr. Rochester’s attic. But the Divine will not be contained and is ever calling out to us, ever willing us to burn down that house of words to release a bigger spirit.
