God-language in Public and Private Prayer: A Place for Integrating Gender, Sexuality and Faith

Abstract

Drawing on feminist liturgical critiques of prayer, Audre Lorde's notion of the erotic and Carter Heyward's relational theology, amongst other feminist, Womanist, Black and queer sources, this article proposes that prayer via gendered and erotic images of God and Christ may be a site for the integration of gender, sexuality and faith — not only in the life of the individual but in the wider body politic. The notion of integration is problematized alongside heteropatriarchal practices of prayer, and an eschatological understanding of prayer and identity offered. The article argues for prayer which engages with a multiplicity of embodied, erotic and queer images of God (and particularly Christ), as necessary to the complex work of personal and political integration with which prayer is charged as well as gesturing towards the fullness and mystery of God who both inhabits and transcends the limitations of metaphorical discourse about the divine.

Keywords:

• Christology
• feminist liturgy
• gender
• integration
• prayer
• sexuality

Notes

1 For a critique of the heteronormativity of much Christian liturgy, see Garrigan 2009.

2 Marjorie Procter-Smith identifies these forms of liturgical discourse in Procter-Smith 2000: 59–84.

3 Though note Sarah Coakley's advocacy of the “kneeling work” of slaying patriarchy that feminists alone can do (2013: 327). Against a certain consensus in feminist liturgy, Coakley argues for a feminist Trinitarian reclamation of kenotic vulnerability in contemplative prayer.

4 See, for example, Paulsell 2002 and many of the rites in Rosemary Radford Ruether's classic Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities (1985), which address the bodily realities of women's lives ignored in mainstream liturgy (for example, incest, rape, burglary, abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, coming out as a lesbian, and so on).