Holy Spirit’s Personal Pronouns

I remember vividly the first time I heard someone refer to Holy Spirit as “She”. It wasn’t all that long ago. I had been teetering on slumber, my usual state whilst enduring anything remotely approaching ‘sermonesque’. My eyes shot open, "Wait! Did you hear that!?! Did he just say that? You can't say that! Can you say that?"

I was waiting for the lightning bolt from heaven to strike him down, or the stones from God’s faithful defenders to pummel him…something. You can’t just get away with that, can you?

I suppose if I were being truthful, I had been wondering around the issue for quite some time. I had never actually used the forbidden “She” word, even in hushed tones, for fear of reprisal, but something had begun to feel a bit off about the conventionally accepted all-male trio… Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Kind of an odd non-nuclear sort of family, I guess. What was Holy Spirit’s role in this heavenly expression anyway? The other Father? The younger Son? The crazy Uncle? Hard to know. I had ceased using “He” a while back. Just “Holy Spirit.” Not even “The Holy Spirit.” That felt too formal… like a title… “The Prince of Wales.” Just “Holy Spirit.” Not title-ish, not male-ish, not female-ish. But, alas, also not very personable. You could hug the Father, you could kiss the Son, but kinda hard to get your arms around the vaporous nebula of a Holy Spirit.

I had to admit, the ‘comforter’ attributes of Holy Spirit seemed more motherly than fatherly. There, I said it. BUT YOU CAN’T SAY GOD’S A SHE! I know that. I’ve always known that. The church has always known that. Everyone knows that. Right?

You just have to love the era in which we breathe. If you want to get an array of opinions on a thing, I mean everyone’s-opinion-in-the-world, living or dead, you just have to take out your phone. Or don’t even bother and just say, “Hey Siri.” Boom! All opinions…all positions…all everything.

Here is a sampling of the wildly diverse opinions I quickly learnt, each fully convinced they possessed the sole truth: Opinion one - “There is absolutely no biblical basis for God as feminine.” Opinion two - “In the bible, God is referred to in feminine ways more often than thought.” Opinion three - “The Christian God cannot be presented in male or female terms.”

There you have it. Clear as mud.

I spent the next several hours researching what would have once taken several days. Turns out it’s not so one-sided. In fact, the word used throughout the scriptures for Holy Spirit, ‘ruach’, is a feminine noun in Hebrew. Who knew? While that fact alone may not be conclusive, it is, at least, an interesting clue. I won’t burden you with the details of my findings, you can do your own study if you choose, but I will tell you what happened at the end of those enjoyable hours…

Holy Spirit whispered gently to me, “It’s not complicated. Read the beginning.” So, I opened to Genesis chapter one. “Let us make man in our own image…so God created man in their own image…male and female.”

There it was! Plain as the nose on your face…from freshman algebra. I recognized it immediately, “If A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C.” It’s called the ‘Transitive Property of Equality’. (And no, I didn’t remember it was called that…I’m not a total nerd…I had to ask Siri.)

“The point?”, you ask.

If God made man in their image. And they made them male and female. What can be assumed about God’s image? Right! God’s image is male and female. Freshman algebra. Who’d have thought it would come in handy one day?

Now, I fully realize this experience is mine, not necessarily yours, or anyone else’s for that matter. And, as Nanin the Mystic says, “We are each powerful to embrace or reject one another’s experiences.”

As for my individual experience with Holy Spirit? She made Her personal pronouns quite clear for me.