God, I am stripping away all my images of you, and I don’t know what is left. — Colette Lafia
In the ministry of spiritual direction — especially when approached from the perspective of Ignatian spirituality, which emphasizes using the human imagination to pray — we talk a lot about the “image of God.” God, of course, is beyond all imagery, all human concept or language. But it’s our human nature to use our imagination to try to comprehend or understand God (even if we don’t believe in God). Whatever the imagination comes up with, that’s our “image of God.”
Sometimes it’s just an image we’ve been given. It’s easy to recognize our culture’s God image of the old white guy with long white hear and a beard: this is the image of the deity that shows up in the art of Michelangelo and Rubens, among others; by the twentieth century this had become a cliché, sometimes used for comic relief (see Monty Python and the Holy Grail where a sour-face old white guy God makes a hilarious cameo).
I imagine most people who read this Substack have long given up on the old-dude God; but as contemplative author Colette Lafia reminds us, that’s not the only image of God that sometimes falls away. During a retreat at Gethsemani Abbey in the midst of a difficult period of her life, she finds herself praying to God that “I am stripping away all my images of you, and I don’t know what is left.” A prayer like this can be offered in more than one way. It can be a cry of desperation, a pilgrimage into a desert where God seems elusive and inaccessible, so much so that even our imagination is left mute. But perhaps the God stripped of all images is an invitation into a place of deep contemplative freedom.
The desert can seem austere and unforgiving and even devoid of life; but perhaps it is also a place where anything is possible. If all our images of God have been stripped away, then we are no longer constricting God to our own biased limitation — conscious or unconscious. An imageless God is truly free, and can call us into that same liberating place. Our imagination may fail us, but if we can trust this God, we will be led into the cloud and the dark night toward a new dawn where the possibilities are endless.
Quotation source: Colette Lafia, Seeking Surrender: How My Friendship With a Trappist Monk Taught Me to Trust and Embrace Life (Kindle Edition), p. 11.