S11 #08 - Pan(en)theism, pronouns, and a kinder speech about God - A thought for the day

The full text of this podcast with all the links mentioned in it can be found in the transcript of this edition, or at the following link:

https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2025/11/panentheism-pronouns-and-kinder-speech.html

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Opening Music, "New Heaven", written by Andrew J. Brown and played by Chris Ingham (piano), Paul Higgs (trumpet), Russ Morgan (drums) and Andrew J. Brown (double bass) 

Thanks for listening. Just a reminder that the texts of all these podcasts are available on my blog. You'll also find there a brief biography, info about my career as a musician, & some photography. Feel free to drop by & say hello. Email: caute.brown[at]gmail.com

Transcript

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation 

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As you know, one of the projects I was working on during my sabbatical is the translation of the Czech Unitarian Nobert Fabián Čapek’s most important book, To The Sunny Shore—A Guide to Living Joyfully, and I’ve been doing this with the insightful help of Ruth Weiniger. Now that we have gone carefully through the whole text for a second time, I am writing the introduction, and I have come to feel it will benefit from including Čapek’s ten principles of living, or ten pieces of advice, which I introduced to you just over a year ago. Ruth and I have also worked through this short text, and today I want to share some thoughts about the tenth advice, because, as a native Czech speaker, Ruth helped me bring to the fore a vital nuance it contains.

In English, nouns have no grammatical gender. Nevertheless, the words “God” and “Wisdom” are traditionally treated as masculine and feminine respectively. In my first draft translation of the tenth advice, I deliberately allowed the lack of grammatical gender in English to remain in play:

“Have faith. Take care of your faith in God — the Supreme Wisdom. Be aware of its presence within yourself and in everything.”

I kept both God and Supreme Wisdom as neutral nouns by following “Supreme Wisdom” with “its presence”, instead of “her presence”. This is a legitimate decision because Čapek’s understanding of the divine embraces masculine and feminine imagery whilst also being beyond both.

However, Czech, which does have genders for its nouns, keeps forcing the issue back into view through the grammar itself. If we take this fully into account and foreground it, we see that in his tenth piece of advice Čapek is saying:

“Have faith. Take care of your faith in God (Bůh [m.]) — the Supreme Wisdom (Nejvyšší Moudrost [f.]). Be aware of her presence within yourself and in everything.”

Here the feminine pronoun — “her” — flows quite naturally from the feminine noun “Wisdom”. English lets us glide away from this and go to “its”; Czech does not.

Richard Boeke (1931-2025), who produced the English version from a Czech translation by Paul and Anita Munk, faced a similar problem about how to handle the gendered nature of Czech nouns. His version opens, “Mother Spirit, Father Spirit, where are you?”, and then moves into added picture-language about “skysong”, “forest”, and “ripples”.

By using Mother/Father imagery to gesture towards a kind of universalised, gender-neutral “Spirit”, this version can make the reader think that God’s gender is the central concern of Čapek’s hymn. In fact, it is not. A literal translation of the Czech begins like this:

“Mother of the world, Father of spirits, where is your realm?
Your realm is everywhere; you are enthroned in everything — who knows you?”

Notice that Čapek does not collapse Mother and Father into a single gender-neutral universal Spirit or God. He leaves both masculine and feminine nouns fully in play. You might ask, “What about ‘where is your realm’, where he uses a feminine singular possessive pronoun? Isn’t this making God feminine?” It is not, because the feminine pronoun agrees with the feminine noun “realm”. Grammatically, the “your” belongs to “God’s realm”, not to God’s supposed gender.

Čapek’s play with grammar may feel arcane and head-spinning, but the dizzying experience is part of the point. He is using Czech to unsettle all gendered language about God. The language keeps refusing to let us settle into imagining God as simply male, simply female, or neatly neuter. The rest of the hymn lists where this God is to be found — in the cosmos, the ocean, suns, eternity and time — and speaks of a God who has everything in itself — we could say within himself or herself — and speaks through all mouths: a strongly pantheistic, or more probably pan(en)theistic, vision.

In Czech, then, the hymn is doing a great deal of theological work. Richard’s version significantly softens this by using more picture-like language, and by adding natural images such as “forest”, “skysong”, and “ripples” to give the hymn more poetic colour in English. Now, as beautiful as these colours are, I think they obscure Čapek’s central thrust about the need to move beyond the limits of language when talking about God, and the divine in general.

All this helps us see that Čapek was concerned to use gender metaphorically, dynamically, and inclusively. He was not inviting us to peer behind the curtain of the universe to discover whether God is ultimately male, female, or neuter, but to use grammar to unsettle any easy assumption that God must be imagined in one of these ways. His language quietly refuses to let one gender have the last word, even whilst recognising its real and significant role in human life.

Facing this directly in Czech, and not being able to slide away into the neutral “its presence”, has been really helpful to me. It reminds me that we always talk about God, the sacred, and the divine through particular languages with particular histories, gifts, and wounds. Working with Ruth on the Czech text, and, indeed, with Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s Japanese texts, has meant allowing myself to be questioned by other languages and cultures. That, in itself, is part of the Unitarian conviction that truth does not belong to any one person, tradition, language, or set of images and metaphors.

This matters because many people in our own time carry real hurt from the insistence that God must only and always be “He”, and that human beings must also fit neatly into a limited set of gendered boxes in order to reflect that “He” properly. Čapek offers us a way forward that is neither a simple reversal — simply turning God into a “She” — nor a tidy, universal theological system, but a more generous imagination. He shows us that God can be addressed as Mother of the world and also Father of spirits; God as a Father can be named as Supreme Wisdom whose feminine presence is in every creature; yet none of these names is final. They must stand side by side, preventing any one of them from becoming an idol.

For a free-religious community like ours, this suggests a way of speaking about God that is at once faithful and hospitable. We do not have to abandon inherited languages, nor pretend that gendered words, and gender itself, are meaningless. Instead, we can hold them more lightly and let them play off against each other until what comes into view is not the imagined anatomy of some distant divine person, but the depth and breadth of a divine reality in which all of us live and move and have our being. My hope is that seeing this through Čapek’s language will help us practise a wider, kinder speech, in which those who have been harmed by rigid images of God can breathe again, and each of us is encouraged to discover the divine presence — however we name it — within ourselves and in everything.