Did God Have a Wife?

In the theologically conservative Protestant Christianity of my childhood, the sacred was always imagined as masculine: God the Father Almighty, Lord Jesus Christ the son, both of whom were represented on Earth by an all-male clergy. As I grew older and learned more about other Christian traditions such as Roman Catholicism, I was fascinated by their devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus as also the mother of God, given their belief in the divinity of Jesus. And although she was, in some senses, a feminine image of the divine, there remained the issue of her supposedly perpetual virginity: seemingly women could only be sacred images if they were sexless.