What God looks like (metaphorically, anyway)

Interpersonal love reveals God.

My student, Torrey Joyner, was a brilliant academic, excellent basketball player, and campus leader at Emmanuel College in Boston. After graduation, he was teaching and coaching in a middle school in Connecticut when he caught a virus. The virus itself was relatively harmless, but his body’s immune system overreacted and attacked his spinal column, leaving
him partially paralyzed from the waist down.

Throughout the ordeal, he was supported by friends, family, and his girlfriend Andrea. Several years later, he and Andrea were married. Torrey, now in a wheelchair, wanted to stand to take his vows, so that he could look Andrea in the eye while giving them. He worked hard at physical therapy, but also relied on the support of his friends.

When the time came to take his vows, two of his groomsmen brought him a walker, then helped him to stand. They removed the wheelchair. Torrey looked Andrea in the eye, supporting himself, but also supported by his best man, who stood behind him with his hand on Torrey’s back. The first groomsman supported the best man, and the next groomsman supported that groomsman, on down the line, five men linked together in support of one, so that he could support himself and declare his love for the woman who supported him and whom he would support.

To see love is to see God.

“No one has ever seen God,” writes John. But his assertion does not mean that God is completely invisible: “Yet if we love one another, God dwells in us, and God’s love is brought to perfection in us” (1 John 4:12). According to John, we see God by loving one another.

At Torrey’s wedding, we saw the invisible God. This experience should not surprise us, since God is love, and we are made in the image of God. But God as Trinity is not an independent self. God as Trinity is a community of interdependent selves who support one another. Likewise we, who are made in the image of God, are made to support one another. For this reason, notes Mark Heim, “The personal bonds humans form with each other are the repositories of the deepest fulfillment most of us know.”

I am not, nor can I be, a separate whole. I am interrelatedness. You might ask yourself: Where is your unrelated self? When was your unrelated self? The newborn’s first attunement is to its mother, not itself. Contemplation reveals that there is no I without You, no self without community. We are all located, and we are all integrated. This flow of locality into locality, of uniqueness into uniqueness, generates a pulsing cosmos.

Residing in a universe sustained by an internally differentiated and perfectly energetic God, we cannot flourish without difference. For this reason, the other—the one who is different from me, who does not conform to my established mode of interpretation, who renders the obvious suddenly unfamiliar—comes to me not as threat but as opportunity, as a symbol of God, as an “infinity from on high.” The other is the life-granting neighbor whom God invites us to love.

Because we are made for one another, peak experience will be unified experience. One example of unified experience is flowing conversation. Flowing conversation erases the boundary between self and other. When you are in a conversation, and your conversation partner’s words are affecting you, and your words are affecting your conversation partner, where is the dividing line between you? Through language my thoughts become your thoughts and yours become mine. We exchange feelings and laugh together and cry together. We enter the conversation in one state and depart it in a different state—comforted, enraged, saddened, encouraged, or enlightened.

But in such a flowing conversation, we do not change each other. Instead, we are both changed by the conversation. The conversation becomes, through our openness to one another, a third entity, an emergent reality, within which your thoughts and mine combine but are not confused. Yes, our thoughts constitute the conversation, but from those thoughts arises a new thing with its own activity and its own becoming, an unexpected and abundant manifestation that discloses the mysterious potential resident within relationship.

Abundant life flows with love.

Made in the image of God, we are made for flowing love. There is no part of us that is cut off from the rest of the universe. The isolated, pure, rational consciousness does not exist, has not existed, and will not exist. Indeed, it cannot exist, because the mind cannot be separated from the body, reason cannot be separated from the senses, and the self cannot be separated from others.

According to our Trinitarian understanding of humankind, Descartes’s project—his quest for certain knowledge through rigorous introspection—was wrongheaded. Thirsting for epistemological certainty, for perfectly reliable knowledge, he reduced himself to pure rationality. There, alone in his mind, he discovered God, the infinite cause of his concept of an infinite God. Being perfect, this God was not deceptive, so Descartes decided that he could trust his knowledge. Sensory experience was of real objects and reason was competent to analyze it.

Such confirmation would suffice a robot, but it is inadequate to human understanding, because we are more than robots. We not only sense and think; we also feel. Most gloriously, we feel love. But in his Meditations at least, Descartes had received no knowledge of love. How could he, as an isolated consciousness? Love does not grant us certainty. Rather, love casts us into all the complexities and ambiguities of this worldly existence and its attendant emotions. Love demands risk; love demands incarnation.

This understanding of humankind as relational endorses a centrifugal self. We are invited to expand more deeply into God, the world, neighbor, and self. Our nature is not to be fixed; our nature is to change, to increase, and to surpass ourselves, both as individuals and as societies. Through this process, we embrace reality ever more wholeheartedly. In contrast, petty egoism is impoverished. The great currents of life lie within and without, awaiting our participation. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 108-111)

For more reading, please see:

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Michael Moriarty. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 2000.

Heim, S. Mark. The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends. Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.

Voss, Michelle. Dualities: A Theology of Difference. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010.