January 26, 7:00pm (Kevin Westling)
So… I guess what I am suggesting is that we pry open our 21st century secularized and highly sophisticated thinking; and come down off our high horse, and get down and play in the mud of our existence, and mix it up with a lot of very human-centric kinds of imagination. Get down, get basic, get elemental, get primitive, get very poetic and human with God. Bring God a little closer. Put your tiny little fingers in that massive hand of God that has held a universe or two. Place your face right in between those massive celestial breasts and say “Amen.” Cuddle up, whisper out loud, and bring God humanly closer. It’s just an exercise. It’s just imagination. It’s just poetry. But heck, so often we live into what we imagine.
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Trinity @ 7
by Cam Miller
January 24, 2010 @ 7:00 p.m.
Okay, you’re going to thank me tonight
when you lay down upon your pillow,
close your eyes and see the image of a Mantis eating a Wasp!
The religions with God at their center
have also largely sculpted God
from our own human image –
reversing that beautiful passage in Genesis
about God creating us, male and female, in God’s image.
It is not because of something heinous about humans beings
that we create God in our own image,
we have certain limitations.
We can’t help but be anthropomorphic –
we see the cosmos through human eyes.
We don’t have any choice.
We feel the textures of life through our fingertips,
or across the bow of our beautifully human bodies.
We hear the music of life blown upon the whisper
of air riding the rippling curvatures of the human ear.
We taste the bitter and the salt,
the sour and the sweet
through luscious lips that open to wet human tongues.
We smell undulating aromas and scents arising from ocean and soil, rain and sweat, food and refuse
all pouring through the portals of the human nose.
We see color – the very currency of life – and we perceive distance, and we behold the human face with our glassy orbs, the human eye, that gives and receives love.
So how could we not imagine
that God is somehow shaped in human form?
Surely fish have exquisitely streamlined and colorful fish gods,
while frogs have long-legged froggy gods;
and naked-mole rats have…
well, surely they have gloriously furry rat-like gods.
My point is,
that ever since we got so smart with numbers
and particles
and genomes,
we have lost a certain poetic license with ourselves.
We pooh-pooh anthropomorphism
as antiquated thinking and as being very primitive.
How could we ever refer to God
in masculine or feminine pronouns again?
How could we ever, with any self-respect,
think about God in human terms?
Never mind the Michelangelo masterpiece
of two fingers
from two divinely naked bodies
nearly touching one another.
We can no longer fathom or tolerate such paternalism,
such human-centric imagination.
But I think that is sad,
because what we know best
is the human form, the human mind, the human touch.
What else are we going to do but imagine God
and the cosmos through human eyes?
We can of course,
take what we know about the universe
and say to ourselves,
“Gee, if God is the creator of all of this,
perhaps it all reveals something about the nature
of the creator?”
And that would be logical.
Something of God is in the Mantis and the Wasp.
Something of God is in the flood and the earthquake
and the prairie fire that both burns and reinvigorates life.
Something of God is in any, and every, eco-system
that reveals an amazing interdependence
between competing creatures both large and microscopic.
We can look around and imagine
that the cosmos is sacramental –
an outward and visible sign
of God’s life-giving and unseen presence.
But…
in looking at all of that –
from the sub-atomic to the gastronomic to the entropydic –
we will also be looking through human sensory organs.
We will be interpreting through human thought-processes.
We will be limited in what we see and perceive
by human limitations.
Everything we see,
whether we recognize it or not,
is viewed through our anthropomorphic lenses.
So why not take a look at God,
as Anne Sexton does,
through the poetic imagination of the human experience?
We might yet learn something if we do.
Just as Mary Oliver can imagine herself as a river,
home in the most elemental terrestrial sense,
you and I can imagine God at home in the human body –
your body…
even my body.
Or, as the Sufi says,
“In an insect’s wing is an ocean of life”
also means that in your slowing breath
God sings a thousand songs.
“God loafs around heaven,
without a shape
but He would like to smoke His
cigar…
God owns heaven
but he craves the earth…
He doesn’t envy the soul so much.
He is all soul
but He would like to house it in a body
and come down and give it a bath
now and then.”
So…
I guess what I am suggesting is that we pry open our
21st century secularized and highly sophisticated thinking;
and come down off our high horse,
and get down and play in the mud of our existence,
and mix it up with a lot of very human-centric
kinds of imagination.
Get down,
get basic,
get elemental,
get primitive,
get very poetic and human with God.
Bring God a little closer.
Put your tiny little fingers in that massive hand of God
that has held a universe or two.
Place your face right in between those massive
celestial breasts and say “Amen.”
Cuddle up, whisper out loud, and bring God humanly closer.
It’s just an exercise.
It’s just imagination.
It’s just poetry.
But heck,
so often we live into what we imagine.
So tonight, I invite you to light a candle in prayer –
a kind of quiet little invitation to God,
who is looking over your shoulder
hoping like a teenage wallflower,
that you will be the one who wants to dance.
