Monday, November 17, 2008

Face of God

What does God look like? Does he have to look like anything? Does man’s visual ability apply passed death when the spiirit separates from the body?

There are a thousand different questions about the basics of religious and or spiritual beliefs. If you sat down and had the average Christian, asked them to fill out a questionnaire, you would likely get many different answers to the same question.

While I know what traditional Jesus looks like with his Nordic ashen blonde hair, blue eyes and perfectly chiseled face, it might not be the person I get to meet in the afterlife. What if I walk up to the gates of heaven and see a long line and sit down on a cloud and then start shooting the breeze with a stranger taking a smoke (smoking is forbidden in Heaven – don’t you know that?), then the stranger walks back inside the employee’s gate without having to slide his ID card through the gate-key and then I find out that that was Jesus (for Christ’s sake!). And then I have to go through St. Peter’s gate and metal detector. What if Jesus talks about my contempt for organized religion? What if my name magically appears on a “do not admit” list? All this because I did not know what J.C. looked like?

Of course anybody might get the boss’s son wrong in a line up but what if I encountered God up there or even down here.

There is this concept of a “personal God” I have heard about for many years and I never looked up the definition because I thought I knew what it meant. The definition is something like giving human attributes to a non-human entity. It is not unlike making cartoon characters and giving them animation and voices and well you can fathom what I am talking about.

I always thought that a personal God was the person, God, I was talking to inside of me when debating the direction of my moral compass. Heresy you say. Well let me say this. There is an awful lot of money and power out there in the name of the creator of the universe. There is not a lot of heart among the bureaucrats feeding off the good life in God’s name. I think I can at least trust the good inside of me and not the wolves in sheep’s clothing out there.

Going back to something I have probably said before, faith in somebody else’s faith is extraordinary faith indeed. I may be standing alone on a street corner so to speak in my quest for spirituality in a very non-spiritual materialistic world. The organized meal-ticket christians may sneer at me but do you know what?

The divine spark within me is lot more comfortable and real than the whole cacophony of religions today. I may only have my own faith in what I perceive to be the divine things of this world. I am not worshipping the personal Gods and obsolete insights of long dead prophets, biblical kings and saints.

I know what God looks like. He, or she if you prefer, looks a little like every one of us.