In the image of God

One of the verses or phrases from the bible that has always made me stop to think for a second is that which says that we were created in the image of God. I have had a bit of time to contemplate this statement and this is as far as I have come. Please bear in mind that I do not know half as much as I should know about the bible and I also know very little about life in general so these are just my idle time thoughts informed by my personal  journey.

For a long time, this is how I interpreted that scripture; if God made man in his image, man being a generic term for the human race, God must be like me and everyone that I see in the world. So, since we live in a world that loves categories, God  would be Black, White, Asian, Coloured, Indian, European, man, woman and the list can go on and on. I held this belief for quite a while.

When I awoke to the realization that inequality at the level of race, gender, sexuality etc was actually a reality and that it manifested in many different ways and at varying degrees in different places and spaces, I started to ask myself a whole new set of questions all together. I asked myself why is God a ‘He’? and why is it that whenever a human body is chosen to represent him it is often a white male body. I am referring here to the pictures of Jesus Christ found in some of my catholic prayer books, the pictures of him my parents, like almost every other parent I knew growing up, hung on our walls for protection and representations of him in movies etc. I asked myself, if God made us in his image how come I only see him being represented in this body? Then I remembered ‘Bruce Almighty’ and then I thought “but that is also a male body”.

The image that eventually started to emerge for me was; God is not universal because there is only one true God like in Christianity and Islam. The universality of God, I  believed needed to be understood in terms of the fact that in almost every culture on earth, God manifests in one form or the other. I started realizing that God is too big for any one religion to claim complete understanding or ownership of. A universal God started emerging as a supernatural being, spirit, not male or black or anything simply spirit.  I thought this was a good place to be, a good way of understanding God, but I still didn’t understand how I or we could be godlike or  how we could be created in his image.

Then today I remembered one of the speakers who, at a workshop I attended, said that outside of all the things that make us human, outside of everything physical or biological we are also spirit. Sometimes we call it spirit sometimes we call it the soul or the higher self but ultimately we are spirit, we are energy. The good thing about the spirit or the soul or whatever you want to call it, according to this speaker and the other things I have read, is that it is universal and it is formless. Everyone has one, even if you do not think you do and this spirit is the part of us that is made in God’s image.

I think that when we try to understand the world by looking at ourselves in our entirety, critically and honestly, what we ultimately find is God or at least the piece of this Supreme Being that resides in us. What we find is that the piece of this supreme being that resides in us also resides in each and every human being no matter how evil or ungodly we might consider them, in spite of what our schools, parents, religions and governments may tell us about them, in spite of the physical form they take, they are spirit, made in the image of God.

I know many who will dismiss this post because of the premise in which it is based i.e. the belief in the existence of God, but I like to believe however that there has to be God. This God is love and this God is hope.

Obviously this is a very rosy image of humanity. I mean if we are all manifestations of  the mystical, how then is there so much evil in the world? How can we see God in the men and women we know or who we’ve heard did horrible things to others and therefore to themselves? How do we avoid the danger of thinking ‘our God must be better than their god’? Basically how do we continue to be so ‘human’ with so many flaws and prejudices even though we are all part of one and the same Spirit?

I do not yet have answers worth sharing here and I might never have answers, maybe I am even asking all the wrong questions but this is where I am at. What are your thoughts?