From my very first moments on earth, I was dressed up on Sundays and taken to church. Every week, barring illness, I would go to what we called Sunday School. I would sit with my friends and hear stories from the Bible about Jesus, Noah, Abraham, and David, often accompanied by flannel figures on a board as illustration. It seems strange to me that after all this time invested in learning about the Divine, that I would have no image with which to anchor Him in my mind. I was unconsciously asking, “What does God look like”?
Most other days of the week, I lived in a world of make-believe; of images in clouds, fairies and wood-nymphs. My friends were the insects I collected and kept in tiny homes, and characters who lived within the pages of my books. Neither my parents nor my teachers appreciated my imagination, it was a liability to be worked out. I was regularly reprimanded for daydreaming.
The stories I heard at church somehow fell short of capturing my imagination. Perhaps this was because they were taught not as stories full of mystery and magic, but as a vehicle for moral lessons.
Maybe it was this that kept me from imagining what God looked like.
The first time I felt personally drawn to God was when I experienced a kind of love I had not previously known. While I could not glimpse this God, I sensed it was someone who saw and loved me for who I was, not for how I behaved nor how “seen and not heard” I was.
The churches I attended did not have icons, statues, or stained glass – the places one might turn to for an image of the Divine. There were no pictures on walls or crucifixes in our home to help me form a mental picture of what God might look like.
Years passed and a picture of God remained elusive, but there were times when I sensed a presence which was barely discernable and impossible to confine to an image. A flicker, a hint of something beyond. Weightlessly floating in a blow-up dinghy on the clear tranquil waters of the bay, casting lines and watching our little red bobbers. I am fishing with my Dad. The silence gathers me in, enfolds me, giving me a sense of “all is well” as we sit suspended over an entire world below the surface. This inner sense of wholeness, contentment, and well-being felt like a brush with the Divine.
Within a short drive from where I grew up was an Amish community, a sect of Christianity which eschews modernity and has strict rules for everyday living. They make dolls, but always without facial features, since to do so was to break the commandment against having an image of God. To put a face on a doll was to give it the look of a person who, as was taught, carries the likeness of the Creator. Perhaps these views seeped into my consciousness, another barrier to picturing God.
Over the years, I learned much about this God we discussed at church. I could recite whole passages from the Bible by heart. I knew how to behave; I knew what I should believe. This only seemed to reduce God to a list of acceptable moral standards, and a set of ideas one could intellectually assent to. Where was the God who I was told created the platypus, puffer fish, and lady slippers? Where was this imaginative source of such diversity and uniqueness? And what would such a God look like?
Humanity has always sought a way to represent that which is transcendent. Painting, sculpture, and song all seek to bring that which is ephemeral into the realm of reality. We are creatures of physicality and perhaps our longing for an image of what we call God is an attempt to relate; to taste, touch, and see the mystery which is beyond us. We want to know, however we envision the Divine, that this God is close enough to touch, is involved in our lives, and is a source of help and comfort.
An image of a mothering God came to me later in life. After mothering my own children, being broken open and given for the life of others, I felt myself gathered up in the hands of something much greater than I. It happened at a retreat for women where the leader asked me to close my eyes and imagine myself with God. What did it look like? How did I feel? In this place, I was invited to embrace my intuition, my instinctive knowing, and my imagination. I allowed my collected glimmers to gather and morph into a shape solid enough to hold on to.
A cupped hand, womb like, held me as I rested, curled in fetal pose. A place of generativity, safety and sustenance. Nestled in this darkened sanctuary, I begin to believe I am wanted, I am loved, as an eagerly-awaited child. In the cradle of God’s hand I am re-mothered and reminded of my innate worth, which is not tied to performance or adherence to a set of beliefs. I could just be and know that was enough. Here finally was a picture of God I could embrace.
Perhaps we each form our personal vision of what God might look like. In the ancient poetry of the Middle East, there is a line which suggests that something deep within reaches to find a corresponding depth that will respond to answer a question we may not know we are asking.
This essay was first published in Being Human Magazine, Issue 3, Savor.