This is such a sappy picture of Jesus. He’s so soft and sentimental — as Eden would say “All mushy-gushy lovey-dovey looking.”

I can’t say that I really like this picture…but it I do connect with it somehow.

Most of my adulthood Jesus has not been the main player of the Trinity for me. I’ve been more connected to God the creator, or maybe God the Holy Spirit. Living in the Vineyard, or at least at myVineyard, this was not neccessarily an easy thing. There are lots of songs about being in love with Jesus, and being uber connected to Jesus. Once, when Brennan Manning was at my church as a guest preacher he told this story about having an estatic, mystical “I’m in love with Jesus” moment and then he actualy said “If you do not understand and experience Jesus in that way, you will not know him when you see him face to face.” Needless to say, since I’d never had that kind of lover-of-my-soul moment with Jesus, good ole’ Brennan certainly sent me into a crisis of faith. Seriously, I don’t think I recovered from it for years. So, I internalized a lot of messages about my faith, and my realtionship with God, and how it probably wasn’t really up to par. It bugged me — that I wasn’t hanging out a lot with Jesus, lover-of-my-soul.

Eventually though, I got okay with that. And I really do think it is okay. I think you can be just fine with the big parent upstairs even if you aren’t mushy-gushy with the dearly beloved son. But last year, about his time, just before Lent, something shifted in me. I think it had to do with the fact that I picked up the practice of centering prayer. I’d start by focusing on an icon of the Trinity and asking God just to show me what “he” was doing today. But eventually, the image I ended up with the most was this feeling of me resting on Jesus’ shoulder, the way I rest on Paul’s shoulder at the end of the day when we curl up in bed.

Now the thing about that particular cozy position is that it is a feeling I conjur up when I am afraid. I learned this technique for dealing with phobia’s where you press your thumb and pointer finger together repetedly in a pinching sort of a motion while you think of a place where your feel the most safe. Then you approach your phobia, like a spider, or a snake, or in my case the top of a ladder, while you make that motion. It’s basically a behavior modification trick to reprogram your heart and mind to think something other than “terror” everytime you approach the thing you are afraid of. You associate a safe feeling with this motion of your hand and it calms your terror down.

So somehow, in my subsconscious, or through a divine act, I eventually came to associate this feeling of safety and comfort with Jesus. That’s why Jesus as Lover was one of the ways we approached J.C. last Lent. That’s why I never went to see Mel’s Gibson’s The Passion. I just couldn’t deal with seeing my lover slashed up like that.

I know, I sound wierd.

These days I’m on a very intentional journey to rediscover feminine aspects of God. I was meditating on this a few months ago, asking God to give me a feminine image of the Godhead. Suddenly an image came to me. It was like a three-dimensional projection of Jesus was standing on my belly. It was sort of like that image of Princess Lea that is projected out of R2D2 saying “Help me Obe Wan Kenobe…” (You remember that, scene right?) Anyway, there was this image of Jesus standing on my lower belly. It was like there was a pool of clear water there, with little ripples running through it, moving out in circles from around Jesus’s feet and calves. Then Jesus started scooping up the water and pouring it over his head. He did this over and over again. I immediately understood that this had something to do with the womb, and baptism, and that Jesus was named as Divine, as the Son of God, at his birth and at his baptism. I knew this was an image connected to birth, and birthwaters, and that is was an affirmation that there was a place for the feminine in the understanding of God– though I was not able to unpack it then, nor have I finished doing so now.

Last week I read this in Dance of the Dissident daughter by Sue Monk Kidd:

I began to wish for a thawing of the divine symbol so it could take on new life and connotations. So many of the symbols within Christianity became frozen at some pont, after which they no longer allowed users to participate in the Divine in new ways. By unfreezing the symbols,we could, for instance, draw on women’s experience and think of baptismal waters as uterine waters…

In Vineyard-speak, we would call this “a confirmation.”

So basically, I’m interested in reclaiming my womanhood in relationship to the Divine, and I’m interested in seeing the feminine parts of God. And I guess that’s why I chose this picture. Because Jesus is the lover of my soul — my very feminine soul.