When you think of God, what images come to your mind? This past week, I was asked to draw a picture to answer this question. When I stood back to examine my work, one thing immediately stood out to me: not a single person was in it.
This observation called me to reconsider how God is perceived. On the one hand, John 4:8 says that God is love, a quality that transcends humans and brings all living things together. On the other hand, Genesis 1:27 says that God created humankind in God’s own image. How can we reconcile these different characterizations?
Language, while useful, doesn’t always help resolve that question. The words we use to describe God can reflect a singular, exclusive image of the divine. For that reason, I tend to shy away from using pronouns, at the risk of sounding repetitive. And yet, there is a certain power in the numerous names of the spiritual presence that surrounds us. Our Mother, Father, Creator, Jehovah, the Word made flesh, Holy Spirit, Alpha and Omega–the names we have given to the divine all try to capture the breadth of its spirit.
There was a television series that aired several years ago called Joan of Arcadia. The premise was simple: the main character, Joan, encountered God in her everyday life, each time in the form of a different person. While I doubt the same will happen to me in the near future, the basic idea of the show resonated with me. It reminds me now that God is a presence without a single face, feature, or name. God can appear to us in any number of things, from nature to music to silence. As hard as it is to visualize the divine, we interact with it daily–we only have to recognize it.