Beyond Image

God is beyond all imaging. We may project images onto the vast space of imagination, and may need to for comfort sake. Yet the God who is God, who may let us play with masks and images, acting as if this or that is God, or the seeming grounds for denying God’s existence. These are, however, games we play. This poem looks at how it is that God is beyond our images.

BEYOND IMAGE

You are beyond image
But not beyond sensing,
How, cannot be explained — ever.
I sense You as nothing else,
Though You are here, yet not here,
There, yet not there.
In the Multiverse of You,
You are everywhere,
Meaning there is no place at which
To point where You are not;
But that also means there is no place
To point where You are,
As if to locate You at some specifiable point
On an imagined scale of immeasurability.

The truth is, any image of You reduces
You to the confines of that image, as if
To hold You fast
In its tentacles of denotation and connotation.

Surely You must laugh at our attempts
To capture You, as if to quarantine You
To our likes and purposes: we say
Be this God and not that God –
As if we are in secret charge and not
You, who may be the Creator
But not the Controller.

Imagery then is a power struggle
Between the pictured and the picturing,
The imagined and the real.
Inexplicably, You give us the option here
To opt out of normal channels of established
Traditions of historical religions,
So we may seemingly forge our own God at will,
If we should choose to form a God at all,
Choosing to accept as God only the God of our desiring,
Rather than any other possible God, who might
Brush aside our feeble attempts to makeover
Our Maker, as if the pot created the Potter.

The truth is, like it or not, fight it or not,
You are simply, purely, beyond all imagining,
For You come to us as the unexpected burning bush,
The side attraction which turns out to be the main event,
The unheralded, humble stranger in our midst,
Embarrassing us with the meager request to be
Recognized, accepted, even appreciated
Among us, as the One who refuses to act like the One.