The term Gaia has caught on among those seeking a new ecological spirituality as a religious vision. Gaia is seen as a personified being, an immanent divinity. Some see the Jewish and Christian male monotheistic God as a hostile concept that rationalizes alienation from and neglect of the earth...I agree with much of this critique, yet I believe that merely replacing a male transcendent deity with an immanent female one is an insufficient answer...
Even when we bring the most difficult situations into prayer, the pain and resistance are in the situations, not in the prayer itself, as prayer is always true to itself. It discloses its own nature — that of a door a passageway to the Great Life of God. Prayer does not hold dismay, even though whatever we pray about may, for prayer move us off the place where we find ourselves and ushers us along — closer, at least — to the place we long to be.