Hazor stele -- hands raised in prayer
“The permutations of gender in mystical texts, and among
mystics themselves, are endlessly interesting. Nevertheless, it is wise to
remember that this category is not ultimate. As the great Jewish theologian
Martin Buber argued, a human being and God can only be related as two subjects,
an “I” and a “Thou” – not subject and object, or “I” and “It.” (Buber chose
“Thou” as the singular, intimate form
of the pronoun, du rather than Sie.) Any “I” who says “Thou” to a
lover must be present as a whole to a whole. This is true above all of the
divine, eternal Thou, who sustains
all relationships and is knowable only through dialogue and presence.
Significantly, the pronouns “I” and “Thou” in English, as in German, are
ungendered. Whenever an “I” speaks to
a “Thou,” gender is grammatically
absent, for “he” and “she” emerge only at the distance of third-person
narration. These pronouns thus reveal the difference between a direct,
first-person relationship with God, experienced in prayer or mystical union,
and the narrative produced when that experience is recounted to another. As
soon as the third person intervenes, the I-Thou
relationship becomes a story about He–and–I or I–and–She. It is this necessary,
but distorting gap between the experience of relationship and the language of
narration that gives gender, fascinating though it is, more prominence than
most mystics would say it deserves.”
— “Gender.” The
Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Lamm
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