For years in my new thought circles we have said “Mother-Father God” as a way to include the Mother, include the Goddess in our God, something that didn’t happen in our childhood. We have also often referred to God as “It” in order to leave the gender out. But now that I know more and more people who identify as neither male nor female, some going by the pronouns “they” or “them,” I begin to wonder whether “Mother-Father God” and “It” leaves out not only the in-between nature of God but also the plural nature.
Let me unpack this. See, where I come from, God is all there is. God isn’t a man in the sky with a beard or a woman in the sky with conch shells on her breasts, God is an energy of love that connects and makes up all things. Because the God I understand has formed into all of creation, the sky, the earth, the galaxies, as well as all types of people, plants and animals, that God feels more to me like a They or Them than a singular point of Mother, Father or It.
Now of course I hasten to point out that because God is all things, God is the Mother, God is the Father, God is the It and God is the They and Them and the Z and any pronoun or configuration there is. There is really no way to limit God to one pronoun, one gender, one human definition. And because there’s no way, there would be nothing inaccurate about referring to God as He, She, Mother, Father, or anything at all. For that matter, there would be nothing inaccurate about referring to God as Tyrannosaurus Rex or My Little Pony.
Yet, how we refer to the All in All, the Source of Everything says much about what we value and what we include in our time, place and point in history as limited humans. I remember a huge aha a few years back when I realized that my thinking was SO black and white. I always wanted clarity on everything (still do, as a matter of fact). I wanted to know answers to such deep questions as Am I fat or am I thin? Am I worthwhile or am I a piece of junk? Should I or shouldn’t I do this thing?
What I have learned is that while God is most certainly in all things, the Truth of the Divine lurks in the human gray areas between black and white. So knowing that, and knowing the time we live in and knowing that we are moving into a richer gender expression between and including male and female, men and women, mother and father, today I am choosing to call my God, “the Holy They.”