There was my immediate family of course, most specifically my Italian mother and grandmother who took charge of my religious education, stewing me in the Catholic tradition like the canned tomatoes that went into my mother’s sauce: Without much thought they just dumped me in and at the very start I was quite bitter.

When I was very small God was a bowler and definitely a he. During the worst of all summer thunderstorms when I huddled between my mother and father under the protection of their flowered bedspread, my father comforted my childish fears by explaining away each clap of thunder as “just God bowling” and every particularly loud, rolling crack as God bowling a strike.

In addition to his turn as a star bowler, God was invoked often and in a myriad of ways in my family, sometimes as kindly and loving, more often than not as a sort of Santa-figure who knew when I was naughty and nice and would act accordingly in response to my actions (hence the rather bitter beginning).

Though my parents passed on the richness of the Catholic tradition, with its stories, sacraments, pomp, and, most important to me, its thousands of saints that intercess on our behalf, as I got older my vision of God-as-watchful-old-man-in-the-sky became paper thin—so much so that as soon as my intellectual curiosity was piqued about life’s Biggest Questions, my child’s He-God disintegrated as quickly and painlessly as author Philip Pullman’s Authority-Angel at the end of The Amber Spyglass.

And I was left, at least for a good while in my college and twenty-something years, an atheist.

I have nothing against atheists per se, aside from now holding a strong belief that being an atheist is an extraordinarily difficult task: the diversity of theological interpretations of the divine—once you begin to wander among them—really narrow the possibilities for true atheism (sorry Mr. Harris) (editor's note: Sam Harris is another "On Faith" panelist.) Once you begin to talk of love, justice, and the dignity of human bodies, and when you move beyond exclusive notions of an all-powerful, male authority-figure God, you begin approaching what more recent theologians like Sandra Schneiders, Sallie McFague, and Dorothee Soelle (my academic mothers) understand as God, or more specifically, the feminine divine.

It was through these scholar-mothers (and my professors who introduced us) that my vision and relationship with God/dess was nursed back to health, and eventually encouraged to flourish even by my old-fashioned Catholic mother. She was simply thrilled to discuss God-as-she with me, just as long as I had re-opened the possibility of a relationship with the divine in my life.

So I learned quite late in my real mother’s life—though still rather early in mine—that God could have been many things when I was growing up. I just didn’t have the benefit of knowing the many possible and rich interpretations of my own faith’s vision of the divine—at least as varied in number as there are Catholic saints to pray to—until I went to graduate school for a Ph.D. in Religious Studies.

And now as a young woman scholar of religion, I am responsible for quite a good number of older children—college students, mostly young women—a large number of which are truly lost when it comes to their faith lives, and most of all, their relationships with God.

But they perk up when I ask them to set aside Old-Man-Gandalf in the sky for a moment, to then teach them about the many, alternative visions of the divine that come right from within the Christian tradition they are often so eager to forget. We begin considering new metaphors, feminine metaphors: a woman’s body-as-God, one that could take many forms: old, thin, plump, girlie, grandmotherly, of any possible ethnic background, among other particularities. And in these new possible “divinities,” many of my Women’s Spirituality students begin a relationship with this She-God they’d never before known they could consider.

We do not have to pass on a tradition to our children uncritically, and likewise, we do not have to pass down only a traditional notion of God.

I hope I am an example to my students—a “parent” of sorts—who has gone from believer to atheist and back again, and as a result, has something of value to pass on to them that most often goes un-discussed outside the halls of academe: the many possible divine interpretations lurking across theological discourse, most especially the feminine ones, because they are the ones that empower my beloved student-daughters.

Perhaps a conversation about the feminine divine might empower your daughters (and sons) this holiday season. I suggest interested parents start by reading Sandra Schneiders’s brief, accessible Women and the Word as a primer. And don’t worry: while the goddess may be old hat in Eastern traditions, the Divine-She fits right in with Judaism and Christianity, too.