Reading Vijaya Ramaswamy's book, Walking Naked: Women, Society, Spirituality in South India, has been helping me cope with the widespread reference to the divine in the masculine form. It is something that had come to deeply upset me, especially when I have to be in church. I feel this great gap between my Catholic upbringing and my feminist upbringing. Christianity doesn't offer enough room for spirituality. And the feminist leaning makes it difficult to swallow the idea of God as a masculine being, figured with long, flowing robes and wild, white hair. When the Renaissance painters like Michelangelo pictured the Creation of Adam, he solidified this image, and, by placing it as a fresco panel upon the surface of the ceiling of Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, it was sanctified. It became the only way to imagine the divine being within Christian theology.

The older I get, the harder it is for me to invest in the gendered nature of religious practice, especially within a religion whose basic premise is the call to love the other as oneself, but which enables so much discrimination on grounds of forms of otherness.