DESCRIPTION:
Available on iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/she-who-is-single/id1181921122

“She Who Is” honors the women in our lives – friends, sisters, daughters, and especially our Mothers – through affirming the maternal grace and wonder of our Creator.

When I came out in 2010 I had no idea how my relationship with the church and Christian music would progress – if at all. Finding myself was painful, and many friendships were lost. But in 2011, I found a church called The Loft, an inclusive Jesus community committed to social justice and loving people. I’ve been the music director there ever since and am consistently challenged to be more helpful and hopeful. During this time I also discovered the thought-provoking and spirit-lifting music of bands like Gungor and The Brilliance. All of this inspired me to once again write and record songs of hope.

“She Who Is” was born out of need. We were doing a teaching series at The Loft about Imaging God and were having a heck of a time finding songs on theme. We built the study around the work of several theologians, one of which was Elizabeth Johnson, especially her influential book, which is also named She Who Is. (Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, right?) We talked about the tendency to view God as an old white man with a beard sitting in the clouds, and how oftentimes whether we are atheist or theist or something in between, it is this image that we are rejecting or accepting. But even Jesus taught that God is not a man. And I am more than confident God is not white. So then what is God?

To be completely honest, I’m not sure. Is the Divine Being “one of us” as crooned by Joan Osborne, or is the Ultimate Reality “watching us from a distance” as Bette Midler so famously sang? Is God near or far? Superhuman or Force? Above? Ahead? Predetermining from the past? Pulling from the future? Neither? Both? All of the Above?

I have always liked the term Wholly Other – as in God is that which is completely NOT what we are or what our world is. I have also found the framework of Panentheism especially helpful. It is the assertion that everything in the universe is within God and held together by God and energized by God. It’s almost as if you took all the prepositions of language – words such as before, after, above, below, near, far, ahead, behind, inside, outside, among, between, in the midst of, beyond – and saw them as vehicles for the connecting life between every object in the universe. This interconnected web would be the spirit that is God.

The devil may be in the details, but God is in the prepositions.

Of course, I am only one human limited to describing the ineffable qualities of the Divine with my finite language, experience, time and space. But I do think it is important to try to "eff" the ineffable. And I believe it is important to be inclusive when we try.

“She Who Is” is a song that sets out to do just that. In a culture dominated by old-man-on-a-cloud images of the divine, this is an attempt to help even out the scales, even if only by the slightest degree. And I didn’t even have to go to extra-biblical sources to do so.

The Judeo-Christian texts are full of female imagery for the divine. A mother hen gathering her chicks under her wing. A mother bear protecting her cubs from danger. The personified Wisdom Woman, Sophia, depicted as an active force in the creation of the universe. Even the Hebrew and Aramaic terms for the Spirit of God are feminine – the terms that Jesus himself used. So yes, Jesus called God “Abba,” which is the English equivalent of Father (or more specifically as a toddler would say it, “Da-Da”), AND he used the feminine term for the Spirit of God.

Not Either/Or.

Both/And.

Above all though this song is meant to be one of comfort. Though it comes from a place of theological pondering, it aims for a place of emotional healing. In a time where we often feel isolated, helpless, fearful or without purpose, this song is meant to encourage and uplift, to recognize the reality of our struggles but also the possibility of redemption and freedom and hope and love – a reality that I believe can be aided by expanding the word-picture of God to include both the masculine and feminine aspects of the divine.