The Ever Changing Face of God

What or who does God look like to you? In this piece authored by a classmate I came to count on for thought-provoking questions and wise answers, Tiffany Thorne, asks the reader to think about the image of God… who or what does He or She look like? And how can we know for sure when we, who according to Genesis (1:26-27) are made in God’s image, all look, think and act in our own unique way?

Rand Paul, Transphobia and the Jesus Loophole

In the confirmation hearing of Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender woman, as Health Secretary, Senator Rand Paul, a Christian, took his questioning off the rails when he compared sex-change surgery to genital mutilation. Through this line of questioning, Paul’s personal bias and message were loud and clear, “I cannot imagine that a person could want to be a gender other than the one they’re born into.” His lack of personal experience has limited his imagination. And, more dangerously, Rand’s lack of experience and imagination permitted him only to connect with ideas of abhorrence and torture.

Frankly, I have not personally experienced questions of gender identity either. I was born female and do not know what it is like for that gender assignment to not feel right. But I can imagine that other people have this feeling. And, as a person of faith, I have imagined much more incredible things to be true and real. Take God, for example.

Scripture forces us to imagine. God appears in the Hebrew Bible as a flaming, talking shrub (Ex 3:3), a pillar of cloud and a column of light, (Ex 13:21) and a windy whisper. (Kings 19:12) The miracles of Jesus—walking on water and feeding scads of people with a few loaves of bread—force us to imagine. An angel of God visiting the illiterate Muhammad as he meditated in a cave and he began to receive the Qu’ran. Outlandish ideas, right? Nevermind the story of creation. And yet we believe.

Something happens between the Hebrew and Christian Bibles that perhaps causes our imaginations to come to a screeching halt. The first two commandments as delivered from God to Moses are 1. “I am the Lord your God.” And 2. Clarifying monotheism and instruction to “make no graven images.” (Ex 20:2-6) When we recall Jesus’s discussion of the commandments, most notably in Matthew’s gospel, he states what has become known as The Great Commandment—to love God and your neighbor as yourself. (Matt 22:37-40) There is no forbiddance of images of God or Jesus. In the Qu’ran, though there is not an explicit mention of depictions of God or Muhammad, Muslim tradition frowns upon the creation of any human images.

This text, though I hesitate to criticize or downplay Jesus’s focus on love, creates a loophole that limits our imagination—there are paintings and sculptures of Jesus everywhere. We don’t need to imagine. And, though the Hebrew Bible gives only phantasmagoric descriptions of God, perhaps we derive from the Christian Bible that the Son of God resembles his father? The photo above features Google’s response to “What does God look like?” Kenny Loggins or Elon Musk? What effect does this have on our faith?

We are, as people of faith, a community of collective imaginers. We believe, in varying degrees of fact, myth and metaphor in things we have not experienced first hand. The concept of “God” has become so normalized—so embedded in the human experience—that we somehow want to reject the term “imagine.” It makes us bristle. Instead God is real. We “believe” in God. We “know” God. But yet to “imagine” simply means “to form a mental image of.”

It is a certain kind of privilege when we do not need to stretch our imaginations to “know” or “believe” something is true. In the case of God, perhaps we feel blessed, that a prayer has been answered or that we’ve witnessed a “miracle.” Or, relative to this writing, we know a transgender person. So while I “believe” in God, I “know” transgender people. Having walked with, laughed with, cried with, dined with, Zoomed with and hugged people who have completed a gender transition, I have solid, tangible, visible evidence that there are indeed people who have realized their full humanity in their process of gender transition. Unlike imagining or believing in God, I do not need to “form a mental image.” They are there before my eyes. Walking beside me. Sharing their story. Telling their truth. Warming me with their embrace.

I believe that it is possible to feel like you don’t belong in the gendered body that you were born into. I believe that a desired gender change can bring a person into their experience of feeling and being fully human. And that is all I need. And I will be so bold as to say to Rand Paul and to all people of faith—it is impossible to truly believe in God and not believe the truth, validity or legitimacy of a transgendered person’s experience simply because you cannot imagine it.