Posted this brief snippet on an online course and decided to re-post here.
I've known intellectually for a long time that "God isn't a man or a woman." Pretty much everyone (or rather, everyone with whom I interact) agrees on that. They still squirm at any suggestion that they should avoid saying "he," though.
My new year's resolution for 2009 was to refer to God in the feminine for that year, to try to offset my ingrained assumption that God was masculine. I figured once I got that down I could move to gender-neutral language and mean it. By 2010, however, I still thought of God as male, no matter how consciously I used feminine pronouns. So I decided what I really needed was a 21-year-long project to offset my 21 years of referring to God in the masculine.
So, my goal is that by 2030 I will have successfully driven out my underlying assumptions about God's maleness, at which point I will move to non-gendered understandings.
-Nick Miller Kauffman
