The Face of God

by Dennis Green

I wrote a poem recently about “Tribal Faces” and one of my pals wrote back something about the “face of G-d.” I responded with a quip about Mt. Rushmore and wrote, “and who says God has a face?” Which got me thinking…

The anthropomorphic rendition of the deity often shows him bearded, as he is on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a magnificent work of art under which I once stood with 300 strangers and Diane, (who is a little strange, but someone I know.) And if God has a face, and a hand that can reach out and touch Adam and bring him to life, then he must also have a butt, right? And yet I don’t hear much talk from true believers about the Ass of God.

I can understand the desire to make God more human, but in literature that’s called the “pathetic fallacy,” even when the weather, or a mountain is personified. “That storm really wrecked havoc on the town!” Yep. Must have been really angry. That’s why they call her “Stormy.”

But “pathetic” in this instance doesn’t mean grotey, but has to do with sympathetic harmonies and our desire to imagine that the whole universe is in tune with our natures, our very existence. And the pathetic fallacy is also sometimes called a “trope,” an outrageous or “violent metaphor.” A stretch.

In some cultures and religions, it is heresy to imagine or speak of the divine as a person. Or even as a thing at all, as anything made of matter. In Islam, for example, the deity is by sharia law meant to be kept ineffable, the numinous and indescribable reality beyond ordinary existence.

I have no doubt that a “Non-Ordinary Reality,” as Castaneda calls it, exists. Nor that all matter and energy is infused with spirit. But the Disneyfication of God, and religion — right down to the contemporary predictions of the Last Days — turn belief into a kind of self-parody that is only too easy for non-believers to dismiss.

I know many believing Christians, and several ministers, men of the cloth, who get very nervous about the so-called “humanity of Jesus.” This is a doctrine, a dogma of most evangelical and even universalist churches, the notion that Jesus was both the Son of God, divine, and yet also fully human, so that he could fully sympathize with us. Relate to us and feel compassion.

But when I’ve pressed the issue with the anointed ones, they also claim that Jesus was utterly without sin, born of a Virgin, yada-yada-yada, so that when his cousin John the Baptist, (also born of a Virgin), baptized Jesus, he was just kidding. Going through the motions… Or something.

And if Jesus was fully human, he must have soiled his diapers, had sexual longings in adolescence, had a crush on girls, maybe even…touched himself…inappropriately, as they say. Otherwise, saying he was “fully human” is fully meaningless. And no doubt, he had not only a face, and hands, but also an ass that was also fully human. Boxers or briefs?

Now, conceiving of a God that walks among us as a fully human being is the most violent trope of all, a pathetic fallacy of the first order, speaking strictly of course in literary terms. Among scholars, however, there is a major dispute about whether Jesus ever claimed to be the Son of God at all, or whether Saul of Tarsus simply made that part up.

Among Judaic scholars, there is no dispute. None of the “conditions” prophesied regarding the coming of the Messiah, or following his arrival, have been satisfied — especially worldwide peace. And in Jewish theology, the Messiah is not YWH. Nor is God’s face smiling at my little jokes. So crucify me.

©2010