What if God came down to walk in the garden with Adam and it was more like She?

Not a bearded old fart but a wise, calming, older woman?

Would it change the workings of the story for you?

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That’s something I’d been pondering even before Regina Renee Ward’s amazing Bible half-hour presentations at New England Yearly Meeting’s sessions last summer. (Do check them out at NEYM’s website, even if you have an allergy to Scripture. She understands that aversion.) Aware of our varied backgrounds and outlooks, she tenderly took us very deeply into ourselves, personally and as a gathered body, via her selected verse of the day and its context plus brief commentary.

One of the books she recommended was Christena Cleveland’s God Is a Black Woman, and I wound up ordering a copy.

Let me say I definitely find it refreshing. Should I add, eye-opening? She was transformed by her encounters with the famed Black Madonna icons in Europe. Take it from there.

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It has me returning to the concept of thinking in metaphor, which I feel is essential to religious slash spiritual practice.

Metaphor compresses image and concepts and actions in ways that legalistic, “thou shalt not” teachings fail to comprehend.

We can begin with the ways we envision something like God or Christ. To that, let me add, the concept of Holy Spirit becomes quite liberated from the earlier English translation of Holy Ghost. The first is definitely infinitely bigger than the second.

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Well, the story of the Garden of Eden is one I come back to endlessly. It’s pointedly not a children’s tale, despite the efforts of Sunday schools, and that rib Adam lost is something, uh, more erotic. OK?

For now, though, I’m quite wrapped up in my new book about one community’s Quakers in early New England – which as readers of this blog, I hope you’re aware of.

So here we are! How ‘bout a walk?