The metaphor of God as father is a familiar one to those of us raised in Jewish or Christian cultures. For many Unitarian Universalists it now is viewed in a negative way for it is a potent symbol of the patriarchal bias of religions which use it exclusively to describe the gender of God. As Mary Daly said in her book Beyond God the Father, "…if God is male, then the male is God." (p. 19). It represents the belief that ultimate reality and ultimate values have only masculine qualities and so then it logically follows that feminine qualities are of Iesser importance. Obviously, this is not a belief that Unitarian Universalists can hold.

In righting this wrong, many of us, men as well as women, now are consciously choosing to search out and promote feminine images of the divine. At the very least, we are no longer using masculine pronouns for God in an exclusive way and we are making sure to include images and concepts reflective of a feminine God. Ultimately though, we do not want to promote exclusively feminine images of God, either. It is hoped that it will be possible for our young children who are just developing their concepts of what the word God means, to grow up understanding God to be both like a mother and like a father, to have both masculine and feminine qualities.

It is important to use the story, Mother of Us All, and this story, God is Like a Father, one after the other, if at all possible, in order to reenforce the idea that God can be like both a mother or a father. Unfortunately, many congregations cannot always count on all of the children in a class being there in a regular way. For those who miss one or the other of these sessions, it might be important to briefly tell them about the story they did not hear.

The relationship of father to child is familiar and so there will be many associations with it. Jesus used this image to reflect a relationship to the ultimate which honored the transcendence of God yet retained an intimacy. Many of us can identify with this relationship in a positive way because we had a positive relationship with our fathers. However, for some of us, this image might instead reflect unhappy memories of absent or abusive fathers. This, of course, can be said, also, of the metaphor of God as a mother. This possibility is not a reason to decline to use these images, in general, for there can be negative nuances to any image of God for certain individuals, but do be sensitive to these possibilities in the conversations with your group of children.

Although the image of God as a father was occasionally used by Jeremiah and Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible, Jesus stems to have found it especially appealing and it gains much more prominence in the Christian Bible. Talking to God as you would to a father, instead of as a lord, allows the conversation to be much more personal and intimate.

Jesus’ teachings reflected what such conversations with God bad revealed to him. He told his listeners that God loved them as a father would love his children. He told them that what their "Heavenly Father" wanted of them could be summed up in what is called the Great Commandment (Matt 22:39, Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27): love God and love your neighbors as yourselves. He also told them that God wanted them to forgive others of their wrongdoing just as God would forgive them. The prayer called the "Lord’s Prayer", or more often now "The Prayer of Jesus", (Matt 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4) is another summary of Jesus’ beliefs about the relationship between God and people. The metaphor of God as a father implies that people are God’s children and since God is the father of all, all are therefore members of one family. The teachings of Jesus that tell us to love, care for and forgive one another follow from this image of humanity as one family.

These images are supported by the UU Principle that urges us to affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person and by the UU Source which uses Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.