Episode 096: The God of All of Us

At Last She Said It

Cynthia Winward

Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 June 2022

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you grow up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is God a man, a woman, or both? It's a complication we bump up against a lot, if only indirectly, in our religion where God is Heavenly Father, but is also one of a pair of Heavenly Parents. Some members don't seem to notice the absence of the divine feminine in our collective dialogue and worship, while some feel it acutely and yearn for more. But as a church we don't talk about it, so the wrestle with questions is often a private one. In this episode, Susan shares an essay exploring her thoughts and experiences at the intersection of God and gender, then Cynthia joins to add her own insights and ideas. It's a conversation inviting each of us to examine the origins and development of our personal understanding of God.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think that's why I need to just separate gender from God. I needed to
0:08.1	untangle those things. That and the patriarchy that you mentioned previously
0:11.3	right? That makes me need to untangle it from a male
0:13.5	god and then this idea of a silent heavenly mother makes me need to untangle it
0:17.0	from a female god because both of those things are deeply painful and problematic
0:21.3	you know and so it was interesting to me that even after all this thinking about it
0:26.3	and writing about it and doing about it for weeks before I wrote it I didn't
0:30.0	realize that about myself. Hi, I am Cynthia Wynward.
0:37.0	And I'm Susan Hinkley.
0:39.0	And this is at last, she said it.
0:41.0	We are women of faith discussing complicated things and today's title of our
0:48.1	episode is The God of All of Us. It's a pretty big meaty title. Well it's a pretty big title. Yeah it is. It is.
0:56.8	Maybe I was having delusions of grandeur when I wrote that title. I don't know. Well, well let's get into that is today we're going to discuss what you wrote about during our break.
1:09.4	And so I'm really excited for our listeners to get to hear this. And then I'm really excited to kind of discuss because I have all kinds of thoughts
1:16.5	Susan on the things you wrote so I'm really excited to discuss with you after you read your essay So do you want to say anything about your essay before you read it?
1:27.0	I'll just explain kind of where it came from. I got asked to share some thoughts and
1:31.3	a fireside about my experiences at the intersection of God and gender.
1:36.7	And this was shortly after the elder Renland sort of watershed talk on Heavenly Mother so everybody was thinking and talking a lot about that and I did share that evening with some
1:49.8	LGBTQ friends and we got their thoughts also and so it was it was great to hear a variety of
1:59.2	thoughts and experiences around this because to assume that all Latter day Saints are thinking about God or about God and gender in the same ways
2:08.0	would be a faulty assumption Cynthia our presentations and our ideas could not have been more different, but I wanted to share
2:16.0	mine here because I really enjoyed being asked to think about these ideas.
	...

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