An image of God

1754god

July 2, 2018

God

By

Harley L. Sachs

The Bible says that God created man in his own image. I think it’s the other way around: man created god in his own image.  I once wrote a poem about a cod fish who decided that God was a cod. Why not?

As for our own mage, we have many. We are pictured in color, 3d, black and white, x-ray, and negative. Our shadows are also our images. A child might draw us as a stick figure. So which is true? Is any in God’s image?  Or are all of them? Or none?

Carl Sagan said we are the stuff the stars are made of. This is true. Every cell of our bodies contains our DNA, the blueprint for ourselves as a whole. But the DNA is made up of molecules and those are made of atoms. The laws of physics that determine those atoms are the same as those that constitute the universe. Our bodies are a manifestation of that formula. We are part of it.

 We are not constant. We are always changing. Every seven years our skin, the largest organ of our bodies, is replaced, flaking off as dander and renewed. Seen in rapid motion, our ephemeral nature would be obvious. Nothing lasts.

Physicists will point out that we are not even solid. There is space between the parts of the atoms. Cosmic rays pass right through.

Life began when molecules hooked up and reproduced, the beginning of evolution as we understand it. Eventually, here we are! The human form is a temporary coalescence of the universe’s atoms and molecules. We may die but nothing is destroyed; the atoms persist. We are truly what the stars are made of.

So where is God in all this?

God does not look like a man or a codfish. What we might call God is invisible, but it can be expressed, described not in the face of a human being or a fish, or a crucified Jew, but as a formula. Einstein broke it down into his unified field theory. E equals MC squared was an expression of energy.

The laws that Einstein expressed with chalk on a blackboard are an image of the forces that are the universe. Those forces of creation and evolution include us. We are part of it, so in that sense we are a part of God. It is the god in us.

Arthur Koestler saw this as the oceanic sense. He spoke of it in Copenhagen when I was a student there. He also wrote about it in his novel Darkness at Noon.

You can experience it yourself.

Aboard a boat at night when there is no human light pollution the stars feel so close you might reach out and touch them. When the motion of the boat defies gravity, you can feel like you are flying off into the universe. You sense that you are part of it, able spiritually to travel disemboried to distant stars.

If it must have a name that oceanic sense is the awareness of God. It is the awareness of being that transcends the body.

For me, that’s “God,” not a bearded sage or a fructicious goddess. Not a power that can be invoked through prayer to intervene in your sea of troubles. Compared with the powers of the universe, our pettiness has no consequence. With such an awareness, we can achieve serenity, the rapture.

That’s my personal path to “God.” Kabala is another. All have the same destination in mind, though for some who depend on human images, it looks like a crucified Jew. As the Shema states, “Hear o Israel, the Lord our God is one.” It is all one, even expressed in Einstein’s chalky symbols on a blackboard.

Are those blackboard scratchings an image of God? See them as a stick figure representation, like a child’s drawing of a person, but we recognize it. We can look at it and say “Yes!”