SAUCIER — Current likeness
I ran into a friend at a game. He was there with his wife, who I hadn’t seen in ages.
A few years ago, he told me that she was suffering from dementia. I had no idea of her current condition.
She sat in the stands, looking her best, smiling angelically.
He sat close to her, talking often, getting no response other than an occasional nod. From time to time, he’d pat her leg.
He wasn’t doting, probably wasn’t treating her any differently than he had for the past 50 years, but his every act was care and kindness.
A couple of their friends came by. She grinned silently at their words, but there was vacancy in her gaze, reminding me of my mother’s empty Alzheimer’s eyes.
Watching her, a line from the creation story in Genesis came to mind.
“Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air... .”
How could this woman who had so little dominion over her own life, much less the bigger world in which she lived, be the image of God?
Scholars have found this language of divine image in the records of neighboring cultures at the time Genesis is thought to be written. A viceroy, who ruled a territory in the kingdom, did so in the name of — in the “image” of — the king or emperor.
Perhaps the problem is our understanding of the God we allegedly reflect. If our God is all about sovereignty and power, this aging, dependent woman — or for that matter a helpless child, or anyone with one of a multitude of physical or mental conditions — will never assume that image.
However, reading the Old Testament through the eyes of the New, we know that the desire of God is not earthly rule but compassionate care. Jesus has shown us the redemptive power of vulnerability.
“Let us ...” God said. To me, that first-person plural is not the royal we, but the Trinitarian we, the deep mystery in which God can only be described as an endless eddy of love.
That’s the image in which we are made — inviting togetherness, dependent on the other. Nothing — no insufficiency, no insidious disease, no horrible accident — can ever change that.
My friend needs her as much as she needs him.
And in that loving interdependence, the image of God becomes the presence of God.
