Whispering She: What a Funeral Taught Me About the Feminine and the Divine

I went to a funeral recently — a traditional Christian service. I was there to honour the person who’d passed, but I found myself getting increasingly uncomfortable as the ceremony went on. Not because of grief, but because of the language.

God was “He.”
God was “the Father.”
He. Father. He. He. He.

Each time the minister said it, something in me flinched. I’ve spent years unlearning the idea that God is a man, and yet here I was, being asked to quietly sit through that story all over again. It felt so outdated — and honestly, pretty infuriating.

So I did something small, but powerful:
Every time the minister said “He,” I whispered She.
When he said “Father,” I gently said Mother.

Just under my breath. A quiet act of resistance that helped me stay grounded in what I now believe — that the Divine is not some man in the sky. It’s not about one gender being more holy than the other. To me, the Divine is in everything — not genderless, but beyond binary. Alive in the feminine, the masculine, and everything in between.

After the service, I ended up having a really rich conversation with a man I met there. We got talking about sacred language and how so many ancient religious texts have been translated and reinterpreted over centuries — often to suit the people in power.

I shared with him that the name Mary actually comes from an ancient Egyptian word meaning priestess. That changes everything, right? Not a passive virgin figure, but a powerful spiritual leader.

In response, he told me that in Arabic, the word Adam doesn’t refer to a man named Adam — it literally means child of the earth. And we talked about how in earlier versions of the creation story, Adam and Lilith were made at the same time. Equals. But when Lilith wouldn’t submit, she was cut out of the story. Demonised. Rewritten. And so the pattern began.

This whole experience reminded me just how important it is to stay curious. To question the versions of “truth” we’ve been handed. To look at who wrote them — and who was erased.

Because language matters. The way we speak about the Divine shapes how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world. And for too long, that language has left out the feminine. Or distorted it into something quiet, obedient, secondary.

It doesn’t have to stay that way.

So maybe it starts with a whisper.
She. Mother. Priestess.
And from there — a remembering.

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