Divinities Along the Gender Spectrum

Yesterday, I wrote this blog post about divinity and gender and Jesus.  I have been reading Luisa A. Igloria's latest book, The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-life Crisis which imagines the Buddha in a variety of modern situations. It's a great book of powerful poems.

As I read these poems, I realized that the Buddha is not always the same gender.  I thought of my own religious traditions.  I'm comfortable with the idea of a gender fluid God, the Creator aspect of the Trinity.  But what would happen if I played with the idea of a gender fluid Jesus?

First of all, I predict some intriguing poems will come.  I started thinking this way as I went to bed the other night and had a fleeting idea about Jesus and night sweats and menopause.  My first thought was dismissive:  Jesus can't experience menopause--he's male!

My Hindu friends will probably laugh at my experience of realizing this gender binary brain when it comes to Jesus.  I'm thinking of all the theology I've read that posits that Jesus comes to earth to be in solidarity with us in our full humanity.  But if humanity is gendered, can a divinity that comes in only one expression of that gender spectrum/binary be truly incarnate?

I think of quantum physics that tells us that how we experience time, as a linear progression, is actually a giant illusion.  I wonder if later generations will see gender in a similar way.  We think of gender as a binary choice because for most of us, that's how we've experienced it, as either-or.  What if that experience blinds us to reality?

Some theologians would tell us that our stories of the Divine coming to earth in human form is an expression of the Divine yearning to find out what it means to be fully human.  In my Christian tradition, I would ask if God can find out, without the experience of journeying on the earth as female.

Maybe God has done that, and we haven't recorded it, because the recorders don't value female experience and thus would not have registered God among us in a female incarnation.  Or maybe my blinders have gotten in the way too.

I plan to write my Jesus and menopause poem.  I'll write about the lost eggs of Jesus.  I'll turn some Easter imagery on its head.