“There is that of God in everyone.” I heard this often during my sojourn living and working with Friends. My own Quaker daughter said it best, I thought, when she said “At any time, with any person, you may be looking into the face of God – listening to God speak.” What a different reality it would be if we paid attention to that idea; if we looked for that of God in the other. It might prevent us from freezing people into categories of otherness, separating them from us. It might prevent what I consider a growing and terrifying divide among and within religions…simply stopping for a moment to see divinity within the other. Maybe we wouldn’t drop bombs on people then; or blow each other up in such a variety of ways, knowing that we are once again killing God. Each day we are offered a chance to see the light of divinity, the real presence of God among us … each day in our dealings with one another, in our actions, our choices, our policies. Each day we create a world in which God is vibrantly present. Or we choose to let Her die - again.
And the killing gets easier. The most absurd thing I have witnessed in public policy recently is a refusal to limit the number of handguns that one can purchase per year in Pennsylvania. Why do handguns even exist? Why do we need any, let alone more than 12 per person per year? We know where the guns end up. Killing children. Killing those moments of divinity. Every day we create a world with or without the beauty of God present.
Jeff Draine | 12-Oct-06 at 1:46 am | Permalink
I’ve always thought the way we sometimes talk about “that of God” that there is a twinge of heresy about it. No, I’m not talking about it being time to stoke the fires at the stake for Elizabeth here–but rather an opportunity to be aware of how an attractive idea may lead us into thinking we are little gods–when the intent may be otherwise. There is that of God–but also a big hunk of us still in there. How do we discern which is driving the way we see things, particularly the way we see others (as is pointed out here)? So, more to the point–when do we see that of God in Kim Jong Il? Osama bin Laden? A milkman in Lancaster? George W. Bush? What really brings me to the point where that may be possible (and I do say may be… I can’t be certain) is not the idea of God as acting as a part of me–but that I continue to wrestle with the fact that I depend on God to see me with grace–the same God that looks upon my most personal enemy with grace. Even when I can’t see that of God in another–I have to come to God with the humility that I may never know what that of God looks like in the other. So when we act in violence, do we kill God in the other? Or is it more imporant to think that we deny that of God in ourselves?