Faith & Spirit Quote by Mary Daly

A noun pins things down; a verb makes them dangerous. Mary Daly’s provocation works because it treats grammar as theology’s hidden power tool: what you call God determines what you can do with God. “God” as a noun invites possession, definition, enclosure - the kind of conceptual real estate that institutions can fence off and patrol. A noun sits still long enough to be administered by clergy, translated into creeds, and used as a stamp of approval. Daly hears the authoritarian convenience in that stillness.

Turning God into a verb is less a cute linguistic trick than a revolt against the patriarchal habit of naming as control. Daly wrote from within feminist theology’s critique of a male-coded, sovereign “He” who rules from above. In that context, the noun “God” isn’t neutral; it’s a political technology, one that has historically justified hierarchy by presenting it as metaphysical fact. Her question “Why indeed” carries the impatience of someone who has watched language masquerade as destiny.

A verb, “the most active and dynamic of all,” implies process rather than object, becoming rather than being. It reframes divinity as something that happens - in struggle, creativity, liberation, relationship - instead of someone who grants or withholds access. That shift quietly disempowers gatekeepers: you can’t monopolize a verb the way you can a noun. The subtext is an ethic as much as a theology: if the divine is active, then faith is participation, not submission; if God “verbs,” then we’re implicated in the motion.