When Love Looks Like Reimagining God
I’m going to dip my toe in the deep end today and talk about God because, as it turns out, we humans tend to project a lot onto this being and the implications of those projections are significant when it comes to how we understand ourselves and how we treat other people.
Before we get into that, a brief word to those of you who think it’s super silly that anyone believes in God in the first place: The operating word for me here is “believe,” which is quite different from “know.” The existence of God is not a knowable fact, so I’ve chosen to live as if it’s true that God is there rather than to live as if it’s not true. Here’s how Mary Oliver puts it in her poem “The World I Live In”:
I have refused to live
Locked in the orderly house of
Reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway,
What’s wrong with Maybe?
If, in the end, it turns out I was wrong, then nothing is lost by me choosing to believe in a creative God who loves children and polar bears and oak trees and teenagers with an expansive and limitless love. No one is harmed by me rooting myself in a God who never runs out of mercy and grace.
We run into problems when we humans believe God wants us to take other people’s land by force because we (whoever “we” happens to be) are God’s chosen people and therefore our violence is justifiable. We get tripped up when we humans believe that God is going to zip some of us up away from the earth any minute now and that it’s totally fine if we refuse to mitigate the effects of climate change because The Chosen will be saved from the increasing natural disasters anyway, so let it burn. Our beliefs about God have enormous consequences, for good or for ill.
I want to look at two consequential characteristics we tend to project onto God. In becoming more aware of these tendencies, we can be more intentional about actively replacing them with other images of God that might expand the scope of our empathy.
One assumption many of us make is to imagine God as white. A couple of years ago, I heard a lecture by a scholar named Daniel Lee where he discussed the ways white normativity shapes our view of God and the scriptures. White normativity is the often unconscious ideas and practices that make whiteness seem like the norm, defining the most acceptable range of conduct or characteristics and casting all other racial categories as a deviation from that norm. I’ve done this in my writing before, penning sentences like, “Of the twenty people on the shuttle bus, two were African American and one was Asian American.” In writing a sentence like that, it’s white normativity that would make me expect readers to fill in the blank that the rest were white. I unconsciously assumed it didn’t need to be stated because my imagination was shaped to believe whiteness is the default and every other racial category is a deviation that needs to be described. White normativity is the reason most band-aids are made to blend into white people’s skin—not the skin of black or brown people. It’s why the majority of images we’ve seen of Jesus are pictures of a white man, even though he was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern man.
If we live in a world where whiteness is considered the norm, then many of us assume someone is white unless it’s otherwise stated. And if we assume someone is white unless otherwise stated, then it’s highly likely that many of us tend to imagine an invisible God as white—especially when we consider the prevalence of images depicting Jesus as white. And if white people have historically been in power, often by use of violence and exploitation, then the unconscious belief that God is white has devastating consequences. We will believe that God endorses violence, that God wants white American prosperity (no matter the cost to other people), that God primarily calls certain kinds of people to lead—people who dress a certain way, who have a particular educational background, who understand the unwritten rules of navigating rooms with people who have wealth and power.
Another assumption many of us make is that God is a man. That’s a natural assumption to make when the scriptures explicitly refer to God as a man! If I had been writing the Bible 2,000 years ago, I likely would’ve made the same assum—WAIT, I wouldn’t have been writing it because women were considered the property of men at that time. We had no rights and no voices. There were the humans, who were counted—and then there were women and children. It’s only natural that the men who wrote about God, when considering an all-powerful being, imagined God as a man and assigned the pronoun “He” to God.
The implications of believing God is a man are vast, especially when we consider the ways “manhood” is often tied to being tough, machismo, even violent. If we believe God is a man, then who would we imagine God sympathizes with when a male pastor sexually violates a woman, or when a husband abuses his wife? Wouldn’t we be more inclined to be curious about the reasons that pastor or that husband did that—to consider the ways he might be wounded, how he needs grace and compassion, how he’s a flawed human who just needs to be rehabilitated—rather than prioritizing the woman who was assaulted or the wife who is still in physical danger while we’re busy empathizing with her abuser? And if we imagine God is a man, then wouldn’t men just feel more like lead pastors than women?
Those of us who believe in God—or even a force, or an energy, or a being to curse at when we’re desperate—need to reimagine God if we’re going to expand the circle of people we see as important. Because we’re humans, we will imagine God in some form. Perhaps it would help if we feed our imaginations new images of God to offset all the white and male ones we’ve gazed upon throughout our lives. When we read texts that refer to God as female or transgender, it doesn’t mean we believe God is a woman or a trans person—it’s a balancing act to emphasize that God is not a man since we’ve already imagined God as a man hundreds of thousands of times. When we recite poems that depict God as black, it doesn’t mean we believe there is a black human sitting on a throne beyond the sky—it’s a reminder that God is not white. When we imagine God as poor, then we are more inclined to see God in the unhoused person we step over on our way into the grocery store, or the displaced person in search of a new country to call home.
With the expansion of both our imagination and our capacity for empathy in mind, here’s a poem by Alan Pelaez Lopez called A Daily Prayer:
God wears glow-in-the-dark acrylic nails, her favorite color is obsidian black,
she’s lactose intolerant & is tired of femme exploitation.
God buys gold hoop earrings at Dollar Tree & ain’t afraid to wear eyelash extensions
for two weeks straight even if the package reads “one-time use only.”
God says “hi” to everyone the moment she boards public transit & after she’s seated,
she speaks loudly into her phone while munching on hot Cheetos.
God carries a plastic bag with quarters, pennies & her passport cuz she knows
most of her followers ain’t shit & removal proceedings are always already a possibility.
God orders $1 fries, $1 cheeseburgers & $1 drinks at fast-food restaurants cuz
a gurl needs to live & sometimes thriving looks like surviving.
God checks her eyebrows on her phone every two hours & licks her index finger
to realign each hair particle before meeting up with da girls.
God walks into Metro PCS every three days for water damage services cuz she’s too often
weeping onto her Android—M, Tu, W, Th, F, Sa, & Sun—the deaths of Black girls.
God has hired a personal stylist cuz she don’t know no more how to be simultaneously ready
for a funeral, court hearing, birthday celebration, anniversary dinner & the club.
God has a Twitter account with 36 followers & it’s aiiight cuz she follows 794K folk & they
all Black femmes & the 36 that follow her hold her so she can hold the rest of the world.
How do you actively resist imagining God as a reflection of these images we’ve seen? Are there practices or maybe pieces of art that continually reshape your view of God?