Images of God

“…Divinity is found in the current that generates the light and not the container of the light….No one I know collects light bulbs after the luminous capacity has left them. We are briefly illumed, and then what is left is the glass receptacle not light.”

                  -James Hollis. The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves

A pyracantha bush, burning, by the side of the road,
collects in its thorny, painful love, tossed liquor bottles
and cellophane wrappers tucked together with incendiary berries
like the abandoned resolutions of not-quite-evil sinners.
No wonder God gave Moses two stone tablets; it takes a hard head
or downright idolatry to break them. Poor calf, shining in the valley
like investment accounts in a bull market.  Va vitello d’oro!

Or the Old Man River Deity on the Sistine ceiling
touching Adam’s outstretched finger,
a guy after a guy’s own heart. Yup, you’ll follow Him
through the just-cleaned kitchen and litter it
with stinky sports clothes and bloody Crusader armor.
But he kisses you on the cheek and says he loves you!
All is forgiven. Why aren’t there any kitchen lady gods?
No Santa jolly either, He, without the toys and Christmas lights
unless we include the burning bushes of underwatered
pines, the too-dry catastrophic tinder.

And why do we never see a God who laughs?
I’m not saying a slapstick guffaw; that would be mean.
But maybe a raucous hoot while rocking a hip-hop tukus
or conga line kick at a Pascal celebration.
God must have a sense of humor, you know,
to put up with the rest of us. I mean what does He do
when we do the equivalent of peeing on the floor
behind the bookcase because the ants need watering?

But seriously now, it’s more convenient to believe
in the skinny one who hangs upon the cross
than the skinny one we see on Calvert Street
with his sign that reads: Homeless Vet, Hungry,
with hand outstretched whom we choose to believe
…or not.

Yet no one pictures a female God. Her sense is touch.
We feel her deep down in subtle skin below our skin,
Hidden in the unlit corners of souls.
She is the heartbeat that trained your heart to beat,
The unmet longing that threads your pulses,
a string of perpetual beads, of never-ending feeding. 
She rocked us into breathing, then retired to the primitive good
that lives in ancient parts of the brain, the body’s memory,
escaping awareness through cracks in useless concepts.
She calls us to love as she did in the early tales of loving,
even when we act like an ass and sin.
I imagine that she covers her nonexistent mouth
with a nonexistent hand to keep from laughing.  
But, anyway, we hear.

It’s time to ditch the stash of burned-out light bulbs,
and look for God in other places:
in the jagged fissure of a broken heart,
in the untold stories of a dark night’s stars
in the purple halleluiah of the Lenten Rose.
If Rumi is right, that what you seek seeks you,
be still. Wait to be caught.
Wait for God to sneak in secretly
Between, perhaps, two mundane moments.
Or maybe wait for the shock of God,
a jolting bolt of love
to run joyfully amok
through the firing filaments
of your longing.

-Kitty Yanson