This is not to suggest that in fact the Holy Spirit is of the female gender (no more than male) but rather to suggest that it may be helpful to apply female metaphors to some aspects of God just as it is often helpful to refer to God as a loving father.
The late Roland Mushat Frye in his paper “Language for God and Feminist Language: A Literary and Rhetorical Analysis”, well illustrates that the distinctions between father metaphors and mother similies; a brief excerpt:
The Scriptures again and again use metaphor and naming to call God “Father”; occasionally they also compare him with a mother (whether avian or human) by the use of simile. The significant differences here are not simply a matter of keeping scores, where the comparisons to a mother are very few in proportion to the metaphoric identifications as “Father.” These significant differences are consistently expressed through appropriate rhetorical and linguistic forms: The basic distinction lies between the operations of simile/comparing (mother) and metaphor/naming (father), and the meanings they convey. . .
. . .the predicating metaphors God the Father and the Son of God become transparent to the divine reality, words by which the divine persons are called, addressed, recognized, or known. These expressions function as structural metaphors or foundational symbols and images, thereby forming the basis for the entire organism of beliefe, the vertebrate anatomy to which different parts of the living body of faith connect and through which they function. To alter or misapply such structural metaphors can cripple the whole body of meaning which they articulate emphasis mine]."
For a thorough treatment of the male-only priesthood, I highly recommend Fr. Manfre Hauke’s Women In the Priesthood?, published by Ignatius Press.
