In the Image of God
No one can describe the ultimate. We lack words for that experience of eternity, vastness, that state and place and existence that is both embodied and a disembodied. Whatever this essence is that we think of as the divine, it exists beyond seeing and hearing. It is like a knowing without thought.
In other words, God is awesome, magnificent, and terrifying, and it is utterly foreign.
No account of this holy being, whether whispered in private conversations or written down in books, comes close to revealing its essence. For this endeavor, language is futile. So is painting, music, dance, and even fairy tale. Not that we don’t try. We love to try. Yet, every time, we fail.
So when we read, in the beginning pages of the Hebrew Book of Genesis that “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27 NIV), how do we know what that means? Do we think that means God has two arms and two legs? If words cannot capture the truth of the holy one, why would we assume we’re meant to take scripture literally?
Indeed, if we did, we’d probably end up with something like the Greek gods, that pantheon of petty, defensive, impetuous, and insecure deities who took their feuds and frustrations out on people. Some of their gods reflected the finer human attributes, such as compassion, sensitivity, generosity, even tenderness, but that was not the norm for Zeus and his cohort any more than it’s the norm for us. As on Mount Olympus, so on Earth.
An Imperfect Representation
Surely, though, we are not little Olympians. Hopefully, God is not so petty as the lustful Zeus and the vengeful Hera.
Indeed, is God is not good and holy? But if God is beyond our comprehension, so is God’s morality. What is goodness? What is holiness? Maybe Zeus and Hera were more moral than we realize? Perhaps we need to reconsider our ideas of right and wrong.
Yet even if that Olympian couple are not divine, we should probably reconsider our ideas of right and wrong, anyway. After all, if we don’t question them now and then, they become calcified, leading to intolerance and bigotry. Just as no God we can describe is the true god, so no truth we can glimpse is the ultimate truth.
Perhaps, then, this idea that we are made in God’s image is just one more imperfect representation of a perfect idea. In other words, all we know of God is that It cannot be bound by language. Maybe this bible quote is like a koan, a nonsensical question that can only be answered when we enter that space beyond space, that knowing outside of knowledge, that domain in which resides a word that encompasses and makes meaningless all other words, if we could but find it.
Yet even if we do find it, we won’t be able to pass it onto anyone else. We might sense an Isness, and we might point our finger at the moon, but still, the finger will never be the moon. When we attempt to make sense even in our own minds of what we have experienced, it slips away. This god-thing does not like being caged by definitions.
God In the Image of Us
Yet if we are the image of the holy, would it not follow that the holy is the image of us? If we could enter into the knowing of God in a total, immersive, non-verbal way, it seems we would also come to know ourselves. Maybe we couldn’t communicate it to others, but we’d know it. We’d feel it. Perhaps that’s good enough.
After all, every religion seeks this kind of knowing. There’s satori in Buddhism and moksha in Hinduism. The mystical traditions of the Kabbalah and Sufism try to embrace this godness through numbers and poetry. Meditation, prayer, dance, and fasting are all meant to take us to that enlightened place where wisdom shimmers in the realms beyond thought.
So what do we know about God? Not much.
For instance, is God one or many? What color skin does God have? How big, how old, and how curly is the hair of God? Surely questions of form and substance are all meaningless. After all, it’s doubtful that God has form, color, or fragrance. We imagine God in one concrete aspect after another, for that is how our minds work, but even if our images happen upon something like what this or that person has glimpsed in sky or lake or horizon, that doesn’t mean those pictures are God’s true self, if God even has a true self. After all, what is self? We don’t even know what we are, nonetheless what God is.
What Reason Cannot Find
Our human reason cannot grasp it, this being without shape or substance who, according to the tales, built from nothing objects and creatures and worlds that themselves have shape and substance. It’s the old something-out-of-nothing trick that quantum particles are so good at. Could God be a neutrino, one of those ubiquitous particles that never hold still? Maybe God is that which came into existence when existence began, the everything and the all.
But this is simply my attempt to reason about something beyond all reason. Thus, we are left with an unknown, a thing—or not-thing—that is not only inexpressible, but also totally unknowable by our paltry human minds. In the face of God, we are impotent. If God is like us, then is God, also, impotent?
We get lost in circles within circles. How does it help us to ponder God’s essence? Perhaps the scripture that tells us we are made in God’s image is just one more example of our human propensity for wishful thinking, of our desire to be important, to have a special connection with that all-powerful whatever-it-is? Maybe there’s no point in contemplating the meaning of such a phrase.
God as Everything
But what if this idea does have some value? What if we believed we were like gods? How would that inform how we judge one another, how we behave toward each other?
Of course, such ideas can lead to hubris. When we imagine we are like that king of kings, we can turn into tyrants. But God is not a king, at least not in any way we understand kingliness. Remember, we don’t know what God is. So, if we are made in God’s image, if what exists in that ethereal plane is ultimately what exists in our human world, then perhaps we are as insubstantial and unknowable as the essence that we call God? If God is as tenuous as gossamer, then perhaps we are, as well.
Would it not follow, then, that, like God, we have no ultimate beingness, no essence or form? Maybe it’s true that everything we perceive is an illusion, and that the greatest illusion is that we are separate from the divine. We might not be made to look like God so much as we are made to be one with God. Thus, to be the image of God is to be the stuff of the universe, of stars and neutrinos and armadillos and snakes. Nothing exists that is not God; nothing exists that is not us.
To Flow, Like the Tao
I don’t know how we might test such an assumption, but even if it’s true, what does it tell us about how to live in this world we perceive as real? Perhaps it’s like Taoism. When we are connected with the Way, with the flow of the universe, the next right thing simply becomes clear. Morality, laws, the mundane needs and desires of life forms have no special importance. There is the Tao, and the Tao is. Pay attention. Become one with the Way, or, if you will, with God. That’s all.
When we are one with that which is everything, there are no more questions. There is simply the yes. If we are made in God’s image, the trick is not to understand why that matters. The trick is to release our expectations and certainties, to enter into a realm of reason beyond reason, of logic beyond logic, to dive into that sea of unknowing and emerge remembering what cannot be remembered. If we can carry with us, deep in some cranny of our heart, perhaps, the knowing beyond knowing, we might discover an emptiness so deep, it becomes truth.
If being made in the image of God means anything, it is that before we can be fully formed, we must be unmade. We must let go of our illusions and our pretensions and enter into that totally foreign and totally frightening nothingness that is also everything. To be like God, is to be unlike ourselves, yet to be ourselves more completely than ever before.
In faith and fondness,
Barbara
Credits
Photo by Sonika Agarwal on Unsplash
Copyright © 2022 Barbara E. Stevens. All Rights Reserved.