In the weekly newspaper here in Pagosa, I noticed an advertisement for a free movie screening scheduled for last Friday.
I like movies. Especially when they are free. Offer me a free movie and I’m almost guaranteed to show up.
But I didn’t read the newspaper until Sunday, so I missed Friday’s free screening. (I typically read the newspaper on Sunday — front to back — because it offers me an excuse for not going to church.)
It sounds like the movie was a wake-up call to the Church. That is, the American Church. Not to be confused with churches in, say, Russia, or China.
What really caught my eye though, when I saw the ad, was this admonition:
Let’s turn our Country back to Freedom, Liberty, and ultimately God Himself.
For some reason, the phrase, “God Himself” struck me as incongruous. Probably because, here in America, we’re going through this confusing dialogue around “gender”. I mean, to be politically correct, shouldn’t it be, “God Themself”?
Which got me to thinking about how gender is used in various languages. Like, in Spanish, nouns are always gendered, even when you’re talking about something that doesn’t seem to have a ‘gender’ to speak of.
Take, for example, a fence post. It’s masculine, so you use the definite article “el”.
el poste de la cerca
In this particular case, I can see why the Spanish considered a fence post to be masculine. It’s pretty obvious.
But the fence itself, la cerca, is feminine, so we use the article “la”. How does that make any sense? You arrange a dozen or so masculine posts in a line, and they suddenly become feminine?
That’s totally unacceptable to those of us deeply concerned about sexual identity.
And it can be confusing, for someone learning Spanish. If you are talking about a kite, like a paper kite that children play with — la cometa — but you accidentally use the masculine gender — el cometa — people will think you’re talking about a “comet” like Haley’s Comet.
Why would a kite (la cometa) be feminine… but a comet (el cometa) is masculine?
I suspect no one really knows the answer. Or else they don’t want to talk about it.
Luckily for those of us who speak English, our ancestors either didn’t know that a fence post was masculine, or else they didn’t feel comfortable admitting it. So we were handed down the convenient word “it” to use almost everywhere. For example, a cat will be either “he” or “she” — a very important distinction, if you don’t want to be overrun with kittens — but a fence post is simply “it”. (Even though it’s obviously masculine.)
But what about God? Is God really masculine? Like, a guy with a long white beard? Or did God get classified somehow as “masculine” the same way Haley’s Comet did?
What little we know about God has been handed down to us through a series of languages and translations. Some of the stories were originally written down in Semitic languages like Aramaic and Hebrew — both gendered languages — and then translated into Greek, and then Latin — again, gendered languages — and then into English, where the genders basically disappeared except for people and cats and salamanders, etc.
And now, genders are disappearing even for people. (But not yet for cats and salamanders.)
So I thought long and hard about this problem.
When a mother brings a child into the world, she typically makes the child the focus of her existence, feeding the child the most nutritious foods available, buying sturdy shoes and cute outfits, reading bedtime stories, tending to scraped knees. She basically commits her life to the goal of raising a healthy, happy child, and the concern lasts well into the child’s adulthood.
A mother typically shows a similar dedication to care of the house, family meals, and supervising her husband’s hygiene.
When a father brings a child into the world — in a manner of speaking — he generally expects the child to take care of itself as much as possible, because the father has a lot of more important things on his mind. (How about those Houston Astros this year!) The father assumes everyone should be as independent as he likes to imagine himself to be, and so long as he’s making the car payments, everything should run smoothly on its own.
Given that observation, I would have to submit that the biblical translators were correct in labeling our creator “God the Father”. He made the universe, but then He got distracted by watching the game.