New Creation: Living Idols

According to the Hebrew scriptures, humanity is created in the image and likeness of God. Put another way, humanity is a physical representation of God on Earth like a living clay sculpture standing in the inner chamber of God's cosmic temple. Humanity isn't just a symbol of God's presence on Earth, like a statue might be, but is instead a living idol that is filled with very life of the one it represents. The Hebrew people were told not to bow before inanimate idol statues because humanity itself is given that role as we bow to God's own life-giving breath within us. That is the biblical portrait of original human goodness and dignity, if we can accept it.

There are two major ways humans reject their divine image-bearing role. The first is to deny the divine image within humanity and to instead insist that humans lack any inherent value. This is the clay sculpture that doesn't yet see its true form. This clay can't see the work of art it has become and likewise cannot see the beauty of any other form. It lacks the imagination to see what we are and what we are becoming.

The second way we reject the divine image is to believe that our life-breath is our own - that we are a self-created masterpiece that depends on nothing externally. This is the clay sculpture that believes itself to be its own creator and animator. It sees the image it bears as unique unto itself and exists only for itself. It lacks the humility to trust itself to the sculptor's hands.

In embodying the divine image we discover that life and love are one and the same. Both require a complete circuit to flow through us that can only exist in connection with others. To see ourselves as embodied love pulls us out of the prison of our separated existence. The divine image calls us out from our dark place of hiding - perhaps through the love of a parent, or a friend, or a spouse, or a child - each daring us to find purpose beyond mere self-survival.

If we respond to these invitations to live and love, then we will begin to expand our identity outward: first to a group like ourselves, then a neighborhood, then a country, and then hopefully our entire world - with a growing awareness and love for the diversity of life. If we stop, if we fail to keep discovering the divine image in each new face we meet, then we risk retreating back to our self-isolated existence. We will become idols in a temple with no open doors.

As long as you breathe, you are more than clay. Through the movement of earth and sky you have become a holy mountain. You are meant to radiate with the divine life inside of you. Let life and love flow through you freely. There is more than enough for everyone.

"Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God." - John Muir