It had to happen on Mothering Sunday – a prayer to God our Mother.
No prayer for mothers as such, but an androgynous prayer for those in general who provide care for others.
The suburban, quintessentially English Victorian church in which this feminisation of God took place was oh so very respectable – choral evensong with robed choir according to the Book of Common Prayer with the newly-installed vicar, a rising star in the liberal firmament, officiating.
Liberals may argue that this way of addressing God has biblical warrant because He compares Himself to a mother in the Scriptures, for example His reassurance to His chosen people in Isaiah 66v13: 'As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you; and you will be comforted over Jerusalem' (NIV). But God Incarnate, the Lord Jesus, also compares Himself to a thief in the Bible (see Luke 12v39-40) in the context of His Second Coming. We do not pray on Advent Sunday: 'O Lord our Burglar.'
That does not of course rule out some liberal trying it in an attempt to be poetic or to develop a 'spirituality for the criminal community', but it would be absurd.
Jesus commanded His disciples to pray to our Father who is in heaven. There is no biblical mandate for such fashionable feminisation of God and in fact to do so is to paganise prayer.
But this ascending liberal got away with it because of the trimmings of Tractarian worship combined with the traditional Prayer Book liturgy. That is the respectable ecclesiastical cloak under which they smuggle in the poisoned dagger of their false teaching.
The suburban church-going bourgeoisie collude with it by doing nothing. But apathy would not be their response if they got a vicar who sought to challenge the complacent spiritual culture of their church by expounding the Scriptures Sunday by Sunday and by himself acting on the Scriptures in his cure of souls.
Then the poisoned-pen letters would really start to fly.
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Your experience of God being addressed as a woman may be novel in the backwoods North of Sheffield but here in the sophisti-cat-ed South Sheffield its a common experience. Our "affirming Catholicism " parish priest a few years ago on mothering Sunday had all the children out at the front of the Congregation and told them that he was their mother. This confused the children and made many of the real mothers squirm. However he is such a charming chap that such baloney was quickly forgotten.
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