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​The Untamable Wildness of God

An Open and Relational Approach to Kali
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“When I hear open and relational (process) theologians speak, it sometimes sounds like God is all about sweetness and light. I hear no ferocity, no terror, no wrath, no wildness. They’re trying so hard to move past images of a punitive God that something is missed, They render unto God that which belongs to dandelions. There is a ferocious and wild side of God that cannot be tamed by sweetness and light alone. I find it most vividly in the Hindu goddess Kali. I’m wondering how she might be imagined in an open and relational context—and whether, in that imagining, open and relational theology might reclaim the wild side of God.”
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— Samantha, Religious Studies major at a local university

​Samantha’s question strikes at the heart of this reflection. What might it mean for open and relational theology—a tradition grounded in love, persuasion, and relational depth—to take seriously the wildness of the divine? Could Kali, with her fierce compassion and transgressive holiness, help this tradition expand its vision of God? Not by returning to punitive images, but by recovering a divine intensity that refuses to look away from suffering, that shatters illusions, and that walks through fire with us. In Kali, we may find not a contradiction to divine love, but one of its most urgent and untamed expressions.

​Kali
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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Hindu goddess Kali, often depicted as dark blue, fierce, defiant, revelling in her power, and holding in her four or more arms a curved sword and a severed head with a cup underneath to catch the blood. She may have her tongue out, to catch more blood spurting from her enemies, be wearing a garland of more severed heads and a skirt of severed hands and yet she is also a nurturing mother figure, known in West Bengal as ‘Maa Kali’ and she can be fiercely protective. Sometimes she is shown as young and conventionally beautiful and at other times as old, emaciated and hungry, so defying any narrow definition. With Bihani Sarkar, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Non-Western Thought at Lancaster University; Julius Lipner, Professor Emeritus of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion at the University of Cambridge; And Jessica Frazier, Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford and fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies

During this discussion, Julius Lipner reads a translation of a poem by Kamalakanta (c.1769–1821) "Is my black Mother Syama really black?" This translation is by Rachel Fell McDermott and can be found in her book Singing to the Goddess, Poems to Kali and Uma from Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:
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Mandakranta Bose (ed.), The Goddess (Oxford University Press, 2018)

John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff (eds.), Devi: Goddesses of India (University of California Press, 1996)

Knut A. Jacobsen (ed.), Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism, vol 1 (Brill, 2025)

David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (University of California Press, 1986), especially chapter 8

Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripal (eds.), Encountering Kālī in the margins, at the center, in the west (University of California Press, 2003)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

​Kali and the Amipotence of God

​Like many Christians, I am intrigued by Kali and not quite sure what to make of her. Kali is not safe. She wears skulls, drinks blood, dances on the corpse of ego, and dwells in cremation grounds. Yet she is Ma—beloved, maternal, and ever-present. Not because she soothes, but because she reveals, shatters illusions, and guards the soul’s transformation. She disrupts my inherited categories of what counts as holy, what love looks like, and how God might act. She is disturbing and magnetic—repelling and inviting at once.

But perhaps that is the point. In a world that so often hides its wounds behind politeness and perfection, Kali refuses to look away. She asks me not to look away either. She does not come wrapped in comfort. She comes with fire. And somehow, in her fierce presence, I begin to sense that holiness may include what I have been taught to avoid: grief, rage, death, the wild, and even my own shadow. She is not a god of easy answers, but of deep transformation.

I am reminded of John Cobb’s proposal, in Christ in a Pluralistic Age, that the universal Christ is, in his words, “the spirit of creative transformation” at work in the world. Might Kali, in some contexts and for some people, be this very spirit at work in their lives? 

Historical Context

I do not want to abstract too much from Kali’s historical context in India and in Hinduism. The truth is that gods and goddesses can be—and often have been—deterritorialized from their original cultural settings and reterritorialized in new ones, reimagined along the way. This happens across religious and spiritual traditions and is part of how meaning travels and evolves. Still, it is important to honor and learn from originary contexts before adopting or adapting.

This page is an appreciative response to the episode of the BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time, which offers an accessible and respectful entry point into Kali’s historical, theological, and philosophical richness. I offer it above. In the episode, host Melvyn Bragg convenes a panel of scholars—Dr. Bihani Sarkar (Lancaster University), Professor Julius Lipner (University of Cambridge), and Dr. Jessica Frazier (University of Oxford)—to explore the multifaceted figure of Kali. Their conversation shows Kali’s complex nature, highlighting her roles as both fierce destroyer and compassionate mother, as well as her embodiment of non-duality, challenging conventional binaries of pure and impure, sacred and profane.

Dr. Sarkar, a specialist in classical Sanskrit literature, emphasizes Kali’s literary and mythological origins. She notes that Kali first appears in early Sanskrit texts, such as the Devi Mahatmya (circa 6th century CE), where she emerges in battle to vanquish evil forces. Sarkar explains that Kali is not merely a chaotic or destructive figure; rather, her ferocity is morally purposeful. She arises from Durga's brow in moments of cosmic crisis—not as a rogue force, but as a protector who fights for the preservation of dharma (cosmic order). Dr. Sarkar also highlights how Kali defies conventional gender roles, behaving in ways that were—and still are—socially transgressive: drinking blood, roaming cremation grounds, appearing unclothed and unashamed. These features challenge normative ideals of female virtue, inviting a more expansive understanding of feminine divinity.

Professor Lipner, a scholar of Hindu theology and religious philosophy, explores Kali's symbolic and theological depth. He sees her as a profoundly ambivalent figure who represents both the power of time (kāla) and the possibility of liberation. He explains that the name “Kali” is closely related to kāla, meaning time and death—hence her association with impermanence, mortality, and the disintegration of ego. But Kali is not nihilistic. For Lipner, she is a theological paradox: the destroyer of illusion who also offers spiritual clarity. He reminds listeners that many Hindu traditions do not interpret destruction as evil, but as part of a cosmic cycle of creation, preservation, and dissolution. Kali’s frightening iconography, then, should not be taken at face value—it is a visual language of spiritual transformation.

Dr. Frazier, whose work bridges Hindu and comparative philosophy, focuses on Kali’s metaphysical and devotional meanings. She emphasizes that Kali can be understood not just as a mythological character, but as a philosophical principle—a manifestation of the absolute that contains and transcends all opposites. In this sense, Kali becomes an embodiment of non-duality (advaita), where categories like pure/impure, good/evil, creation/destruction dissolve. Frazier also notes the emotional and devotional dimensions of Kali worship: she is approached with reverence, intimacy, and even love, particularly in Bengali Shakta traditions, where she is "Ma"—a fiercely loving mother who both frightens and consoles. For Frazier, Kali’s embrace of extremes does not collapse meaning but expands it, enabling worshippers to hold together the contradictions of human experience.

Together, these scholars show that Kali is not a marginal figure in Hinduism, but a deeply layered deity who operates on multiple levels: mythic, moral, philosophical, emotional, and ritual. She is both transgressive and redemptive, terrifying and tender—a mirror to the human condition and a window into the divine mystery.

Kali in a Process Context

There is a tendency within process Christian theology—with its deep emphasis on divine love, persuasion, and relationality—to domesticate God. God is often rendered too gentle, too soft, too mild. While these images serve as crucial correctives to coercive theologies of omnipotence, they can also obscure the sacred necessity of ferocity—the kind of divine intensity that rages against injustice, burns through illusion, and protects the vulnerable with terrifying force. In softening God, we may lose sight of divine wrath as a face of love—not punitive wrath, but wrath as wounded care, as fierce compassion. Kali may help

Within the framework of amipotence—divine power understood as uncontrolling love—Kali broadens our imagination. Love is not always soft. Sometimes, love is a roar, a blade, a holy flame. Sometimes the divine lure toward healing arrives as rupture and reckoning. Kali reminds us that ferocity, too, can be holy.

From a process-relational perspective, Kali can be seen as a vivid and vital expression of the divine. Each of the following aspects points to a dimension of God’s presence in the world—not as an external controller, but as the Spirit of Creative Transformation at work in every moment:

Fierce Divine Eros

In process theology, God is the Eros of the universe—the divine desire that draws all things toward richer intensity, deeper harmony, and creative novelty. Kali represents this divine Eros not as soft seduction, but as urgent, impassioned protection. Her sword cuts through illusion and stagnation. She is the flame that refuses to let life settle for less than its fullest becoming.

The Manyness of God

Kali collapses false divisions between pure and impure, sacred and profane. She sanctifies the unsanctified and blesses the broken. In process thought, reality is relational and interdependent; there are no isolated substances, only events in process. Each moment of becoming—each actual entity—arises out of the many and becomes part of the whole. The non-dual aspect of God can be understood as the way the many of the universe are gathered into the oneness of divine concrescing life, held in and by love. These actual entities are not divided into categories of pure and impure, holy and defiled. They are all taken up into the divine life—transformed, remembered, and embraced. Kali’s embrace of death, blood, and ash reveals a divine wholeness where nothing is excluded from the sacred. This does not mean that God—or Kali—intends all that happens in the world. Rather, She embraces it, taking even the painful, the chaotic, and the discarded into Her heart. In this light, Kali’s embrace of death, blood, and ash reveals a divine wholeness where nothing is excluded from the sacred.

Womb of Creativity

In Whitehead’s metaphysics, Creativity is the ultimate category of existence—the generative power behind all becoming. Kali mythologically enacts this Creativity: she is the dark, fertile ground from which everything erupts and to which everything returns. She is not one being among many, but the matrix of all being. Here, she may be understood, in Whitehead’s terms, as the “primordial, non-temporal accident” or the primordial character of Creativity—that is, the eternal embodiment of divine possibility through which all things arise. She is not a person among persons, but the encompassing depth in which all becoming unfolds and is welcomed without division.

Healer through confrontation

Kali heals not by avoidance but by revelation. She brings pain into consciousness, strips away denial, and confronts what must be faced. In process theology, God is the fellow sufferer who understands—the one who lures every wound toward wholeness. Kali does not promise to shield us from suffering; she promises to walk through the fire with us.

Call to radical trust

Kali invites us to embrace the whole of life—birth and death, beauty and terror—not as fragmented or meaningless, but as sacred. Process theology likewise asks us to trust in the unfolding of experience, to say yes to change, to live with open hearts in the midst of uncertainty. Kali’s terrifying beauty is not meant to frighten us away—it is meant to awaken us into truth.

Let me not pretend that an open and relational—or process—approach to Kali will carry the same intensity she holds for her devotees in India and the Hindu diaspora. She will be different. She will likely be imagined through a Christian lens, however gently. She may remain wild, yes—but also, for better or worse, a bit tamer. I hope she is alright with this. What I do know is that Christians in the open and relational tradition need some of her wildness. And perhaps, in the ways explored above, that wildness can be respectfully claimed, entered into, and allowed to do its transformative work.

Afterthought
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The Ontological Status of Gods and Goddesses

A process-relational perspective also invites reflection on the ontological status of gods and goddesses. They need not be reduced to mere psychological projections or mythic symbols, nor assumed to be simply omnipotent beings within a supernatural hierarchy. Instead, they can be understood in multiple ways: as actual entities in their own right, existing in other dimensions of the extensive continuum—Whitehead’s term for the layered field of existence within which all things unfold. Or they may be seen as propositions—not in the logical sense, but in Whitehead’s metaphysical sense: imaginative lures for feeling that shape the unconscious and semi-conscious patterns of human experience. And perhaps most compellingly, they may be both: real in their own ontological agency, and also present to us as emotionally and spiritually charged images that awaken, challenge, and transform. In this view, a goddess like Kali is not merely an idea we entertain, nor only a being we worship, but a presence we encounter—an energy that participates in the ongoing creativity of the universe and in the depths of human becoming.

It is also at least imaginable, from a process perspective, that gods and goddesses are portable—not in the sense of being uprooted commodities, but in the sense that they, like ideas or propositions, can move across cultures and contexts, taking on new relevance and form. As they migrate, they are not simply copied but reprehended—taken up into new acts of feeling and understanding that incorporate the cultural specifics of their new locations. This process of reinterpretation is not unusual; it is a feature of religious life across history.
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Of course, this does not mean that all gods and goddesses are, by definition, faces of the divine, nor that all are in service to the good. Some may reflect oppressive structures, destructive ideologies, or merely personal projections. The suggestion of this essay, however, is that Kali can be in service to the good—both within her Hindu context, where she is beloved as Ma, and within a process-relational context, where she may be seen as an expression of the spirit of creative transformation. In both frames, she has the potential to awaken, challenge, and ultimately heal.