In any case, in that first conversation in Celebration Circle, we talked about the way we name God in our liturgies. We talked about the problem of pronouns, of how we don t want to say he all the time, but to constantly say God, God, God, God is, to say the least, somewhat unaesthetic, and how we re always looking for new language, new ways to express what the congregation believes and prays. In the midst of this, someone said, To me, the word God itself is always masculine. I can not get away from the fact that it s masculine . . . At the time, this did not register very strongly with me, but a couple of days later, I was reading a book called In Her Own Rite.
Inclusive language seeks to balance gender references.
Emancipatory languages seeks to transform language use and to challenge stereotypical gender references. Because for me, God is a gender-free term, I believed that anyone who thought differently was simply wrong and ignorant. I didn t want to acknowledge that my freedom was meaningless if it caused pain to another person. I finally understood that even if I could get this one person to agree with me, there were countless others, both within Seekers and in the wider world, for whom the word God always takes the pronoun he. And so the next week, we wrestled with the concepts that Proctor-Smith had laid out.