What Does God Look Like?
Sometimes you hear a comment or see an image that lurches you out of your cradle of comfort and launches you on a journey of discovery. That happened when I participated in a recent symposium called “A Prophet Is Not Known in Her Town: Conversations on Visionary Women,” an event sponsored by the Hank Center at Chicago’s Loyola University.
An unforgettable image became a visual centerpiece for that conversation — a painting by the Chicago-born artist Harmonia Rosales that reimagines Michelangelo’s famous rendering of “The Creation of Adam.”
In Michelangelo’s painting at the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, God is an old man with flowing white hair and beard. Adam is a figure of muscular, white male beauty.
In Rosales’ “The Creation of God,” an elderly dark-skinned woman replaces the white male image of God. She transmits the spark of life — not to a vigorous male — but to a beautifully rendered figure of young black woman sporting an Afro.
I have not been able to stop thinking about that image.
In the Book of Genesis, God creates humankind in God’s own image. As Fergal Mac Eoinin, a journalist who writes frequently on faith for The Irish Times puts it so well, “We have dutifully returned the compliment ever since.”
Additionally, Jesus refers to God in the gospels with an affectionate term for father. Christians followed that example. In a church that is both patriarchal and hierarchical, it’s no wonder that Michelangelo’s male-centric view later cemented itself into the collective Christian consciousness.
Rosales’ re-interpretation invites us to a more expansive view. Interestingly, many of the great mystics eschewed describing God in ways our limited human understanding could grasp. They spoke of God in fathomless terms — as a vast unknowing, a great mystery, the deepest silence, the pure point of being within each person.
The mystics seemed to grasp that God is both infinite and unfathomable, yet as close to us as the hairs on our skin.
Like the artist Rosales, Old Testament writers used feminine imagery to describe God. The prophet Isaiah compared God to a woman in labor and a mother comforting her children. The Book of Proverbs likens God to the feminine figure of Sophia, wisdom.
Even the Hebrew word for God, Yahweh, is a combination of the feminine ending yah and the masculine ending weh.
Jesus too occasionally uses feminine imagery. At one point in Matthew’s gospel, he says of Jerusalem, “I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” Both Matthew and John are unafraid to record Jesus weeping.
Rosales, who is of African-Cuban descent, painted “The Creation of God” in 2017 before the current racial reckoning. She says her purpose is not to deconstruct, but to include and expand.
“Replacing white male figures — the most represented — with people I believe have been the least represented can begin to recondition our minds to accept new concepts of human value,” she has written about her painting.
“If I can touch even a small group of people and empower them through the power of art, then I’ve succeeded in helping to change the way we see the world … And when you consider that all human life came out of Africa … then it only makes sense to paint God as a black woman, sparking life in her own image,” she adds.
Even Rosales’ more expansive view is still limiting, as one participant at the Loyola symposium quickly pointed out. Like Michelangelo’s rendering, it limits God to one race and one gender rather than reflecting humankind in all its glorious diversity.
Some theologians have suggested it is futile to consider God as a noun or an adjective when God is perhaps the most active verb of all.
What if we dared to envision God differently? When we pray The Lord’s Prayer, which begins with the words, “Our Father,” what if we imagined God as a Latina abuela, a compassionate black man, or the grandmotherly wisdom figure like the one found in Rosales’ painting?
How would that affect how we see others and ourselves?
Perhaps we don’t need to imagine God in a dark, imperfect mirror as a human figure at all. To paraphrase the apostle Paul, perhaps it is enough to accept that we will one day know this immeasurable and unfathomable God face to face.
In addition to upending traditional images of the divine, Harmonia Rosales’ painting also offers us an opportunity to reexamine with fresh eyes our other commonly-accepted ideas and long-held beliefs.
Are there any perspectives we have long adhered to that need revisiting, and perhaps even a bit of shaking up?
