Journal of Sacred Work

Blessed are those who trust in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. – Jeremiah 17:7

Everybody needs a God who looks like them, Lily.    – from The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd

    What does your God look like? This Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany is an opportunity for us to examine our personal picture.
   One of my favorite stories of a child’s picture of God comes from a friend who told me recently that when he was a kid, he thought God was the portrayed in the magnificent statue of a man on a horse in front of the downtown courthouse. Images like this may stay with us unless we replace them with a new understanding.
   I used to imagine a God who looked like the old white man in the Sistine Chapel painting with his flowing beard, and his band of angels. This picture remained in the back of my mind for a long time.
   The Bible tells us no one has seen God, so how could anyone know what God looks like?  But we are likely to form an impression anyway. And our image of God may influence our work as caregivers…

    In Sue Monk Kidd’s marvelous book, quoted above, the holiest image is of a black Virgin Mary. Most of the western world may have imagined Mary as white. But does her skin color, or that of Jesus, really matter? For some, it does. They need holy figures to look as much like them as possible. They take literally the language that we humans are made in the image of God. In Divinity School, I learned that the Latin phrase for our pictures of God, imago dei, is used to guide thinking around how we perceive the highest power. The concept of imago dei also suggests that if all of us are made as some expression of God, than we need not be strangers to each other since each person carries holiness within.
   Although "no one has seen God," Michelangelo certainly made a strong effort to paint him. If I think of God as a fierce giant waiting to punish my every misstep, how will I view the world? The risk
of an image like this is that it can cause us to live our lives in almost constant fear.
   If I picture God as a white male, I may feel alienated from this God if I am a black female. This may also cause me to feel that God doesn’t care about me because I am not made in that image.
   If I am a doctor who pictures God as a white male and I am a white male, is there a risk of arrogance in the way I look at patients who are different from this description? How does my imago dei influence my sense of power in the world and, for that matter, my sense of humility?
   But what if I envision God like Paul’s description – as simply and clearly the presence of Love in this world? What if I release my grip on the idea of God as he or she, male or female, black or white? What if I replace this picture with a growing appreciation of God as Love? Now I can sense, if not actually see, God in every loving act, in every expression of beauty, and inside every moment of suffering as well.
   If I can think of God as Love, your skin color or sex becomes truly invisible to me. I look past your surface for the presence of Love within you. My ability to serve your needs becomes, now, a chance to engage with an expression of God in this world.
   We may feel as though we need pictures, and it’s difficult to let go of our old ones. Ultimately, thought, God may not be a single image at all. Once we know that God is Love, so much that is confusing about our world may begin to make a new kind of sense. The meanness and hatred and selfishness in the world is not an expression of God because it is not the image of Love. It then becomes our responsibility to let Love flow through us so that we may dissolve some of the bitterness and hostility in this world.
   Each day, caregivers have the opportunity to live as expressions of light or of darkness. Today is another opportunity for us to meditate on our ability to become better carriers of God’s healing grace. Some may think that everybody needs a God who looks like them. Instead, God appears in anyone and in any place where Love takes root.
   Ultimately, the question is not what God looks like or whether God is present. God is always present. The question, especially in this week of Valentine’s Day, is how open we experience Love, and how we let it pass through us to others.