Trinity by Kelly Latimore

My Dear Good Samaritans,

Many, many years ago, I started praying my daily prayers with the St. Helena Breviary. The Order of St. Helena is an Episcopal monastic community for women, founded in 1945, that follows the Rule of St. Benedict and is committed to a life of prayer, worship, and service within the Anglican tradition. The St. Helena Breviary is their distinctive liturgical prayer book, notable for being based on the Book of Common Prayer but using fully inclusive and expansive language for both God and humanity. It is amazing to see all of the creative and meaningful ways they have rendered names for God: Rock, Holy One, Sovereign, Helper, and Source of Life, just to name a few.

For as incredible and multifaceted as we profess our God to be, for much of church history our prayers and our scriptures have relied on surprisingly few ways to talk about God—and those that get repeated the most are nearly all patriarchal and hierarchical terms like Lord, Father, King, and the pronoun He.

This is a shame, since the language we use for God matters. When we primarily use masculine terminology for God, it becomes easier and more normative to associate maleness with authority, holiness, and power. On the flip side, it makes it more difficult to recognize the maternal and relational aspects of God, even when we encounter them directly in scripture. Our brains actually get wired this way. Which is one of the reasons why expansive language for God can be jarring at first—new neural pathways are actually forming!

As a church, I want us to be a people who see the variety and beauty in the many ways our God has made themselves known to us: in creation, in our fellow humanity, and in Jesus the Christ.

Our baptismal covenant reaffirms, each time we say it, that every person, exactly as they are, is made in the image of God and deserving of dignity and love. Through scripture, tradition, and reason, we as The Episcopal Church have come to understand that the full spectrum of human identity and love reflects the richness of God.

That’s why, as we move through this Season after Pentecost—Pentecost being the day the Holy Spirit allowed all people to hear of the wonderful works of God in their own native language—we will explore the many ways humans have thought about and developed language for God in our opening hymns.

This Sunday we will open our Eucharist with the hymn Bring Many Names. Its opening line says it all: “Bring many names, beautiful and good, celebrate, in parable and story, holiness in glory, living, loving, God.” While there are many more lovely verses, we will sing and explore the first two images: Strong Mother God and Warm Father God. It is a kind of kick-off to the musical and poetic journey we will be taking this season.

I hope you will lean into any discomfort—and also embrace the joy—of learning about our God who is all-in-all.

Peace,