It seems entirely reasonable to believe that humankind is created “in the image” of God. But that doesn’t mean we look like God. God has no individual physical form, and, most important, God is not a person. To the great detriment of society, most of its religious traditions have created a god in the image of man. Depending on whom you ask, which book you consult, God can be loving or vengeful, forgiving or retributive, predictable or mercurial. The God of scripture has moods. “He” gets testy, angry, and impatient, demanding allegiance and obedience. God likes some people and not others. God (presumably perfect in every sense) created the imperfect: an inherently flawed species who will commit every sin in the book and would be eternally damned if not for the sacrificial death of a wise and kind young rabbi. None of that works for me. It is a philosophy that flies in the face of the principles of Divine Love.
So what does “in the image of” mean? I submit that who we truly are (which is not, by the way, our physical bodies), is pure Essence, and that our existence in the illusion we like to call reality is the physical expression of God Energy. To use an entirely un-scientific shorthand, when you drill down to the core, we are an assemblage of as-yet-to-be-understood “God particles.” Put another way, the Divine can, and does, look like absolutely anything that exists, because it is everything that did…does…and ever will exist.
There is so much we don’t know (and are not yet capable of knowing) but that is hardly a reason to settle for less, is it? Why limit our spiritual wisdom to a deity that is but an updated, monotheistic blending of all the gods that humankind has created before? The god of most religious paths sounds suspiciously like Zeus, lightning bolts and all. And Zeus and his Olympian crew had all sorts of human qualities—including some distinctly unattractive ones like petty jealousy and competitiveness. They used humans as pawns in a chess match. Well, now we’ve generally reduced divinity to one being, and while that may be progress, it hasn’t necessarily helped in terms of human unity, has it? And until we recognize that the Source of our existence is not a person by any definition of the word, we may not get much further.
