Sometimes one comes across public utterance so inane that it requires no comment. Nay, it demands that we simply stand in awe, and admire it for the blasphemous nonsense it is. This one comes from the “On Fath” column at the Washington Post:

Mother’s Day is a day when we ought to give God the Mother her proper respect. El Shaddai, God Almighty, the god of breast and womb, the fecund god of fertility, the god that is herself enough; Lady Wisdom, the consort of the Creator God; and in the Christian trinity, Holy Spirit, the comforter, the present dimension of God who remains to guide us and to instruct us ought to receive our praise….

When we remember God the Mother, we can define as divine alternative ethics leading to a new politics. A feminist ethics of care would live alongside an ethics of rights and duty. Such would remind us of the importance of care givers, especially those who care for the weak and vulnerable among us – children, the elderly, the physically and mentally challenged. We would insist that we pay them a decent wage. A feminist ethics that values presence, particularity, relationality, community and peace would balance ethics of transcendence, universality, autonomy, individualism and conflict. It would help us see that soft power, positive power, is power nonetheless, and we can deploy a politics of just distribution of the earth’s resources to prevent war. An ecofeminist ethic would help us regard the earth as holy and insist that we touch it with gentle fingers.

When we embrace God the Mother, we can live into the womanist virtues of responsibility, love, commitment, and complexity, knowing that simplistic answers can lead us astray. For the sake of life and flourishing our analysis ought to pay attention to the various ways the world limits us then seek strategies to move past the limits. When we consider God the Mother, we understand the necessity for the extreme unction of grace, the holly oil that lubricates human relationships to decrease the friction that cause us to cause each other pain.

And here’s the punch line: the witer, Valerie Elverton Dixon, taught Christian Ethics at Andover Newton Theological School (United Church of Christ and American Baptist) in Newton, MA and United Theological Seminary (United Methodist) in Dayton, Ohio.

But you could have guessed that, couldn’t you?