The Ooziness of God

On Sunday, we went to see the Judy Chicago exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.  I was excited to see the work from The Birth Project again.

When I was home from undergraduate school for summer, some of those works came to the D.C. area.  My folks lived in suburban Virginia, and one Saturday in 1985, my mom and I went into the city to the various galleries to see the work.  I was in awe, inspired, and transformed.

I grew up in conservative Lutheran churches in the conservative part of the U.S. south.  We prayed to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  In my brain, God looked like President Lincoln, if Lincoln had a flowing beard, sitting on a throne, a white marble deity.

The Birth Project changed the way I viewed God forever.  Here were images of a clearly female deity giving birth to the world.  I started researching the history of Divine imagery, and I was amazed by what I hadn't been taught.  I started to think about how history might have been different if we had been worshiping a female god.

Eventually I decided that either side of the gender binary was too limiting a way to see God--and to see humans.  So I was interested to see these works of Judy Chicago again, the works that propelled me down this path.

I rounded a corner and saw one of my favorite tapestries, which you can see here, if you scroll down to the second image, The Creation.  I love its colors and the evolutionary feature of the content.  In most images, you can't tell that it's needlepoint/tapestry.  But Sunday, I saw the varied nature of the threads.  And on the screen/page, you can't really tell how huge it is.

The exhibit had ten of the works, and while I was happy to see them again, I wasn't moved by them the way I was in the past.  In fact, I was deeply unhappy with the ooziness of it all.  Every breast is leaking, every vagina is being ripped apart by what's being born.  Did I not see that as a younger woman?  Or was I so thrilled at the idea of a female God that I didn't think through the implications of the ooziness?

I want an image of a God weaving a world out of disparate threads or fusing metals together with a welding torch.  I think it's dangerous to focus on the womb as our primal image of creation or the penis for that matter.  We have centuries of seeing what that means for women--women are confined to their childbearing duties/responsibilities/privileges, and that's used to constrain their horizons.  I didn't think about that aspect as a younger woman.

I am grateful for those images that stirred my thoughts so long ago.  I'm also grateful that my thoughts didn't stop there.  The works seem a bit dated, and I kept reminding myself that in fact, they are dated.  That doesn't have to be a bad thing.  It can be a window to the past, even if it's no longer a door to the future.