I have been questioned about this once or twice, so here's a short reflection.
When we read the Nicene Creed and come to the Holy Spirit, rather than using the pronoun 'he', I use the pronoun 'she.' Why would I misread something so clearly printed in black ink?
This whole problem that underlies my decision to read this way arises because we have all become far more attuned to the subtleties of language and gender. Our cultural language has inherent in it assumptions about gender--strong men, beautiful women; violent men, nurturing women, etc--that influence our thought-world. It's hard to know how much of gender is biologically determined and how much is culturally constructed--I tend toward strong notions of cultural construction--but it is clear that however it arrives there, our language carries freight
Because of the weight of language, churches do much more serious reflecting about how we talk about God. After all, if our language doesn't think of men as nurturing, always calling God "he" is misleading because God does have a nurturing quality. Consider the Hebrew "El-Shaddai," one name for God in the Hebrew scripture, that is often translated 'Almighty.' Literally, however, El-Shaddai means "God of the breasts." Translating it 'Almighty' means thinking of strong pecks, but given the locations of its use in Scripture (like in Ruth), it seems to have the more nurturing feminine connotation. Translating El-Shaddai as 'Almighty' is probably not a good translation. It's a nit-picky detail, but over years, it really affects us whether we think of God as the one with big pecks or the one with a baby at the breast.
This all came home for me when a friend of mine once told me that she never really understood church as a child because she had a terrible relationship with her father. When people said that God is like a Father, she thought, "Well, that sucks." One day, in her teens, someone told her that God was also like a Mother, and for the first time she said, "Oh!" and understood some of who God is.
It matters, I think, that we use a diversity of language about God. If we leave God gender-less all of the time in worship, it's strikingly impersonal. If we always call God 'he' or 'she', we gradually let our mind be weighed down by language. If we shake it up a bit, it keeps striking us new. Surely God is more than one particular gender, encompassing and going beyond all genders rather than avoiding them.
All of that to say: that's why I use 'she' during the Creed. Not because I think the Holy Spirit is a woman--surely She is more than a woman, just as He is more than a man. And if we're going to talk about "God, the Father almighty," and because Jesus as a human being had a gender, it just makes sense to me to say 'she' when we plod along to the part on the Holy Spirit. It keeps God a little fresher in my heart, running me into the parts of God I might otherwise avoid.
And as a side note, I wouldn't change the words of the Creed to reflect my quirk. In fact, I like seeing one word and saying another; I value the juxtaposition that the seen word and spoken word create. But I'll leave that for another time.
