If you’re like me, which, being humans, you are, you’re probably especially interested in the sixth day of the Genesis creation story. On this day, God makes an earthling. The Hebrew word for it is adam, which comes from the word adamah, which means, “earth.” God makes an earth creature. And the way it’s described is downright weird: “Then God said, ‘Let us make an earthling in our image, according to our likeness.’” Us?! Who is us? And to whom is God talking? And if there’s more than one, why is it “image” and “likeness” instead of “images” and “likenesses?” Actually, the fact is that there’s been something suspiciously plural-ish about this God from the start. Geek out with me for a moment on the grammar here: The Hebrew name for God used throughout this story is Elohim. “Im” is a plural ending. It’s like adding an –s to the end of an English word. But when Elohim is the subject of a verb, the verb is always in the singular. So there’s this grammatical strangeness where you have a plural word, Elohim, which is always treated like a singular. And now the plot thickens and we have the very first time that Elohim refers to itself. And Elohim calls itself, “us.” So maybe this God is kind of many and kind of one.
The early Hebrews weren’t the only ones with this idea – it’s actually an eastern and much older concept as well. A thousand years before Genesis was written, early Hindus were writing scriptures that described a plurality of gods and a profusion of life all emanating from one universal life force. They write, “God is One, whom the sages call by various names.” I’ve also heard it described: “Just as the seven colors exist within one ray of light, so too the various Hindu Gods exist within the Supreme, as names of its different qualities.” When you see statues of Hindu gods, they’re so amazing sometimes with five heads and multiple arms and each hand holding a different symbolic object. They’re trying to capture the radical diversity of God. They’re trying to capture in three-dimensional art something that lives in so many more dimensions as to be unimaginable. And it’s all one.
We’ll be seeing some art here in a little while that plays with this idea of translating across dimensions – what happens when you take a three-dimensional human and try to project it into two dimensions while keeping and showing every pixel of it. The image may all be there in two dimensions but it’s completely different. And maybe this is what religion does in general. As we saw in the Easter story a couple weeks ago, religion takes something infinite and indescribable and tries to describe it in a way that people can kind of grasp. Maybe God says “us” in the same way that some gender-queer people like to be referred to as “they” to try to convey a layered, plural identity. Language is always inadequate. As a writer I’m acutely aware of this. Sometimes our representations feel clumsy in their efforts to convey the subtlety and diversity and magnificence of reality. I think this is what we see here in this next piece of the Genesis text.
After we hear about God for the first time as “us,” the text continues: “So God created the earthling in God’s image, in the image of God, God created him; male and female God created them.” I’m going to read it again. This is it. In this story, this is the moment of the creation of the first humans. “So God created the earthling in God’s image, in the image of God, God created him; male and female God created them.” So in one sense God is singular and creates one male earthling in his image; and in another sense, God is plural and creates male and female earthlings in their image. As I’ve said many times before, this is not science; it’s theology. To create humans in the image of a plural God, humans have to be plural. Another way to think of it is that for male and female humans to both be in the image of God, God must be both male and female. And perhaps much more than that. It paints a picture of a God who is multifaceted, multidimensional, both many and one. And of a human world that mirrors that diversity.
We know today that the male-female binary is simplistic. While most bodies fit into those two categories, a significant minority doesn’t. And what we’ve made culturally of our physical differences goes way beyond what’s in this text. Yeshiva University scholar Dr. Joy Ladin, who is a transgender woman, has written a wonderful article on this called “The Genesis of Gender.” She points out that when the text says, “male and female, God created them,” it’s merely describing earthlings of two physical types. But it says nothing at this point about gender. All of the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” stuff comes later. What you have at this point are two humans – two adams – from earth.
Ladin writes about how the text just describes physical qualities of things (male and female, air and water, light and dark) but not the meanings we have piled on. She writes, “Like the male/female binary into which God divides humanity in verse 27, the light/darkness binary is a purely physical distinction, without symbolic or social significance… But even the relatively reality-based binary of light/darkness drastically simplifies much more complicated phenomena. In scientific terms, “light” is a vague catchall term for the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to human eyes; “darkness” has no scientific meaning at all. If Genesis were written in the language of science, the statement ‘God called the light Day, and the darkness …Night’ would read something like this: ‘And God called the period of time when the yet-uncreated humans …would generally perceive the greatest amount of visible electromagnetic radiation (Day), and the period of time when they would generally perceive the least amount of visible electromagnetic radiation (Night).’”
Her point is that we humans impose binaries on what are really continua; we impose value judgments on physical qualities that are objectively value-neutral. We do this with light, we do it with gender, we do it with physical abilities, and, of course, we do it with skin color. The genesis story doesn’t mention skin color. Maybe this is because the author didn’t know anyone with different skin color, just like the author probably didn’t know of anyone who wasn’t male or female. Or maybe it was because skin color was not seen as a structural difference between humans. If that’s the reason, the author was wise. Modern research has shown that from a physiological perspective, race has no meaning. But we have taken the beautiful, subtle continuum of shades of brown that we humans come in, and imposed the artificial binary of black and white. We have piled all our cultural baggage onto what are inherently neutral variances in human bodies. And every time we’ve done this throughout history, it has resulted in one form or another of violence.
What was the author of Genesis thinking in setting the stage for these kinds of false dualisms? And why the confusion of grammar and gender and singular and plural? “Our image… God created him; male and female God created them.” Which is it? Why can’t the text just be clear? Because this text was written by a human being. Probably a man. He was trying to synthesize multiple streams of oral histories and reading between the lines, I’ll say he was deeply conflicted. On one hand, he lived in a patriarchal society that was probably not much more enlightened on gender issues than some of our presidential candidates today. On the other hand, call it divine revelation or not, I believe that this writer was a visionary and had wisdom and insights well beyond his place and time. The idea of a plural, all-encompassing God with male and female dimensions creating men and women together in its own image must have been so radical for that place and time as to be virtually unthinkable.
I can imagine the author struggling internally between everything he had been raised to believe and this sweeping, mystical vision of a kaleidoscopic God mirrored by creation. He struggled to feel the edges of his own spiritual confinement and break free. What we have passed down to us is a written record of that struggle. It’s almost as if the writer said, “God created him … I mean them.” He went as far as he possibly could. But there were still binaries and the writer’s God – Elohim – was still a masculine gendered God. He couldn’t quite get himself to go all the way.
But we can. We can take the author’s vision a step further because there’s a long tradition of interpretation in which you can extrapolate and extend the trajectory of the text. You can fill in things that aren’t stated explicitly, as long as it’s in keeping with the spirit. So I envision that where it says, “male and female God created them,” it also says, “other sexes and genders God created them” and “all shades of brown God created them” and “all sizes and body shapes God created them” and “with all kinds of different abilities God created them” and “as different kinds of makers and as different kinds of lovers and with different kinds of understanding God created them. And with different laughs and different gifts and with different footprints and different voices God created them.” All in the divine image.
If only we could all break free of the ways our hearts and minds today are still limited. The ways in which we still believe the false binaries. The ways that we’re trapped in an “us” versus “them” mentality. The ways we reduce the infinite reality to cheap substitutes. Truly if we could double-click on another human being, the entire universe would open up. And then maybe we could walk around seeing the divine image in everybody. I would know that I am not made in the image of God any more than you. And you not any more than me. Because all of these false beliefs we have about the different shapes and sizes and colors that our bodies come in are not natural. We’re not born with them. As in the song from the musical South Pacific that we’ll hear in a minute, “you have to be carefully taught to hate and fear.”
If there’s one thing that scientific and Biblical accounts of creation agree on, it’s that the universe is diverse. It’s a fabulous spraying outward, exploding from a single point, made of all the same elements, but manifesting in an expanding diversity. All the wild variety of the world is a reflection of its cosmic origins. We are made in the image of the universe as a whole.
But what religion can do that science can’t is to call it “good.” The creation story celebrates the radical diversity of life from start to finish. From an undifferentiated, formless and void watery darkness, each day the world gets more and more articulated, rich, detailed, and alive. More conscious and self-conscious. And each step in the process, each evolution, is embraced by the divine. Each new manifestation is deemed good. Nothing is rejected; nothing is cast out of the budding universe. It is one and it is many – the Unitarian vision of oneness and the Universalist vision of a teeming multiplicity of different creatures, all accepted and loved by creation itself. This love, this acceptance, this giddy joy at the dawn of the technicolor universe is the heart of the creation story. Genesis 1 ends with these words: “God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”
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We have a real treat now coming up. Two artists, Lilla LoCurto (who is a member of First U) and her husband Bill Outcault, have created an installation called selfportrait.map that plays with this idea of the human body in multiple dimensions. They’ve collaborated with computer programmers and cartographers and even the U.S. military. What we’re going to see now is three-dimensional scans of their own bodies that they’ve unfurled using computer projections. It’s like when a globe is stretched out onto a flat surface – the center stays pretty clear and the edges get more and more distorted as you move outward. So the artists have tried to show three-dimensional images in two dimensions. This is really what any artist or spiritual teacher tries to do. Take an idea from one plane and translate it to another. You’ll notice in this piece that any places in the bodies that the camera couldn’t see become blank. So the effect is like a map of the earth, with the body masses as land and the white spaces as water. Adam has arranged a creative, hybrid musical experience to go with it. Thank you, Adam, and many thanks to Lilla and Bill for sharing your work with us. Let’s watch together…