Shannon K. Evans - Feminist Prayers for My Daughter: Powerful Petitions for Every Stage of Her Life

I just knew, right from the beginning, that this was my daughter. Perhaps the sense of deep knowing came because at that time I was in a reckoning with my faith tradition over the ways God is masculinized at the expense of the feminine. I was angry that God can be called he and not she. I was exhausted by the all-male hierarchy within Catholicism, the church tradition I belong to. I was adamant that Christians needed to be disentangling ourselves from racism, homophobia, colonization, and xenophobia, and I believed that female leadership would move that work forward. I was longing to relate to God as mother, not just father, but was unsure whether that would ever feel comfortable.

Then, mere days after finding out about the pregnancy, a book I had painstakingly written was pulled straight off the printer by a bishop who deemed me too dangerous to represent the prominent womens ministry publishing the book. There is no overemphasizing the deep shift that occurred in me after this, and it had more than a little to do with the fact that I was carrying in my womb what I knew to be a little girl. She gave me something to fight forsome one to fight for. In the loneliest hours of my faith, when Ive been ready to light a match to the whole thing, the life of my daughter has made me stubborn and brave. I cannot walk away from a God who gave her to me in my time of need. Instead, I have accepted the invitation to reimagine this God I once thought I had pegged: the God who is neither male nor female yet both masculine and feminine; the God who shapeshifts into the symbol or metaphor we need at any given moment; the God who transcends language but still invites its use; the God whom some mystics called Mother, and others, Lover.

As I wrestle with my own way of being with a God who is endlessly more mysterious than I once believed God to be, I feel a sense of awe at the idea of my daughter one day doing the same. Its true that this book came from my own need for more liberated ideas about God, but it also came from the longing for my daughter to know Godand in coming to know God to better know herselfin this way much sooner than I did. The word feminist in the title of this book is quite literal in its definition of simply believing that women are inherently equal to men. But it is important to me to acknowledge the harm that has come upon the BIPOC, LGBTQ, and impoverished communities from the activism of white feminist political movements that has left them behind. I bow with gratitude to womanist theologians in particular who have been leading voices in this social critique. I hope and pray that women of all backgrounds can find themselves and their daughters in the pages of this book.