Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Biblical Reflections on Ministry) by Ivone Gebara

Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Biblical Reflections on Ministry) by Ivone Gebara

Author:Ivone Gebara [Ivone Gebara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-09-12T16:11:00+00:00


Issues Raised about

Ecofeminist Discourse on God

• I can't accept the idea that God is not a person.

• I can't pray to an energy flow.

• We must not fall into pantheism.

• The poor need concrete images of God.

• The ecofeminist perspective fails to stress the image of a God of Life committed to the poor.

• What do we do with biblical images of God?

I CAN'T ACCEPT THE IDEA THAT GOD IS NOT A PERSON

In Latin America, this has almost always been the first objection raised when the ecofeminist perspective is broached. The distinctness of God and God's radical independence in the face of all other beings have been a part of our Christian heritage, especially in the West.

One of the difficulties we have in accepting a different kind of theological reflection is that we have not yet assimilated the fact of the interconnection and interdependence among all beings, much less integrated this with the fact of our relative human autonomy. Our mindset was formed in a patriarchal tradition that posited a break or discontinuity between a Supreme Creator and all of creation. The idea of a divinity that pervades all beings, times, and places was seen in this tradition as a primitive, mythological notion that had been almost totally forgotten by Christian theology. For the superiority of this Supreme Creator over all others to be upheld, this being had to he above and beyond the general run of beings. And in order to uphold our understanding of the relative autonomy of human beings, we had to compare it to the absolute autonomy of the Divine Being. The latter had to be a being in itself, all-powerful and independent of all creatures.

Within this dualistic antithesis, we not only had to grasp the concept of God and of creation; we also needed to understand the notions of "perfection" and "imperfection," and "purity" and "impurity." We set up pure and perfect beings to contrast them with our own experiences of impurity and imperfection. We set up powerful beings to contrast them with our own fragility and weakness, which we experienced in so many situations. It was, in a certain sense, a way of denying our own relative and contingent natures. In reality, we know that we can barely imagine what a pure and perfect being far above us could be. All we can do is deduce it as a hypothesis in order to continue with the life we have received. In the discourse of the mystics, to experience God's life directly seems almost impossible; they always refer to this "absolute" in analogous and symbolic images.

Most of the time, we fail to see that we are dealing here with a mental construct, a making sense of our experience, the using of a set of cultural parameters in order to grasp at the mystery that is alive within our own being. These parameters have been regarded as eternal and proclaimed to be "truth," especially within the western Christian tradition. Institutions and powers were built on these truths; so were dogmas and liturgies, inquisitions and prejudices.



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