For my entire life I've referred to God as "he." My secular parents don't even think about it when referring to the divine in the masculine. It's engrained in our culture. It's reinforced in the story that God manifested Godself in Jesus of Nazareth, who was the Messiah, Christ. Jesus, according to the canon, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God.
Except, Jesus is supposed to be God, and therefore a bit of trinitarian confusion (or mental gymnastics that Muslims and Jews just don't bother trying to understand). Nor should they due to the very fact that it doesn't make sense and was basically a non-sensical compromise that an uneducated population wouldn't question; they would just take what the Church taught for granted. Remember, these are the same people who believed for another couple millennia that storms were God's vengeance. Actually people believe natural disasters and diseases are of the hand of a supposedly-loving God today.
You probably already detect my dubiety. I did try to believe these concepts but it just doesn't make sense how a Jewish rabbi could be a god. No matter how much I "confessed' my faith, including during my baptism, eventually my brain just said "nope." Now, I realize that understanding God is a fool's errand. We can no more understand the creator of the universe than an ant can understand human civilization. Like an ant, we may encounter God, and that encounter is going to be understood in human terms. That's fine. But as an Abrahamic faith, it seems inconsistent for Christians to make their teacher a god. If it helps someone's faith in God, fine. It doesn't add anything to my faith.
The more I try to understand God outside of my own experience of him the more I doubt. But the foundational Quaker teaching that true happiness comes from direct experience of God, reinforces that belief must come from the experience, not belief shaping the experience. One leads to a lifetime of faith, the other can become detrimental to faith when life experiences challenge beliefs. I can tell you this from my own experience, even with Quaker doctrine. Belief must come from the heart, through feeling and sensing. The mind knows the experience to be true and therefore there is belief. It's like a drop in a bucket of evidence. We can experiment with our approaches to God learning how to open up ourselves, to listen, to follow. We learn to recognize where the motions of love, of altruism and selflessness all come from, deep within ourselves. As the scriptures say, God is Spirit and God is Love and whatever we do should foster a relationship built on trust in this Spirit of Love.
So how do I speak of God? I speak of God as experience "them". And this is is going to sound weird but let's take a peek at how God identifies Godself in the very beginning. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. This can sound singular and plural at the same time, but really the Word is an aspect of God that, according to the Christian story, was made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. So here is a they can describe God and his Word. Most Christians would say God the Father, God the Spirit and God the Son/Word were all together at the beginning of time. To say God "he" only refers to two aspects of God: Jesus the Word and God the Father. It does not speak to the holy spirit, the Greek for whom is genderless.
Now some have associated God's wisdom personified with the "we" of the creation story. Proverbs 8 does this where Wisdom calls out to us to head the ways of God and she refers to being created by God from the beginning and how she loves and counsels. This would make the "us" of creations story make sense in the plural. This also could be a remnant of Babylonian mythology which shaped the Hebrew creation story.
But if we of Abrahamic faiths believe God is unity, God is One, then we have a problem: either this is the royal "we," or there were more than one entity involved in the creation of this world (honestly, there's a huge part of me that doesn't care, because we do not know really how this world was created only that it was created). But to not engage the story and divorce myself from the myth leaves me feeling lacking and disconnected. So I engage. I try to anyway.
What stands out in the creation story is how God made humans in God's image both male and female. If God is unity and oneness, and both genders are made in God's image, then the appropriate term to use for God is not him, unless speaking about Jesus or the Father aspect of God. In truth, in the Hebrew scriptures, while most of the terms for God are masculine, not all are, such as the word Shekina. So God, in the Hebrew Scriptures is more often times referred to as male, but is also referred to as female, and sometimes in the plural.
So, here is where I've come to with all of this. I accept that the creator is genderless, and the only reason we apply gender to God is because we are having human experiences, with human understandings. They are imperfect and incomplete, but they are all we have. So, for me, when I refer to God, I may use he, I rarely use she, but am feeling increasingly urged by my experience of this world today to use the pronoun "they."
I know this will drive conservative Christians crazy, and maybe some Jews and Muslims too. I don't care. I'm a Quaker. It's what we do. My mind can limit how I experience God, my life experiences can too. But my life experiences have been opened to a larger realm of gender in the human experience and it is shaping how I see the Divine Oneness. God said to Moses "I am." God has said to me in the silence "I am." Moses wanted to know what he was encountering. I think when we have experiences of the Divine we all want to know. And that experience is revealed to us all very differently, some as a many-faced God, some as Unity, some as many gods and goddesses. In all of that I think it's important to know that They are accessible, powerful and we can have a personal experience of them.
Woo, that's heady stuff. It's the stuff that can make me just say "ugh forget all of it." But our heads always try to make sense of what the heart is experiencing. So I remind myself to trust the experience, not the theology or philosophy which are, in essence, airy notions if not based in experience.
So the next time someone says God is Great, the response being "All the time," I'm going to tack on "They sure are."
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