Joan Chittister, Murshid Saadi Shakur Chishti, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, writing from their traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, believe we all share equally in God’s image, even amid our joint history of violence.
All our traditions—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—teach that the human race and every human being are created in the image of God. Rabbinic midrash says that when Caesar puts his image on a coin, each coin comes out identical—but that when the One who is beyond all rulers puts the divine image on the coin of every human being, each “coin” comes out unique.…
Today, the various Caesars of our planet insist that we must fit into a single mold, the mold of uniformity and death.… The pain of these deaths and of this destruction drives some of the children of Hagar, through Ishmael, and some of the children of Sarah, through Isaac, to forget that they are all children of Abraham. That we are all children of Noah and his wife, Naamah, who suffered through the danger that human violence imposes on all who dwell on our planet.…
If we are to celebrate [the Infinite God], we must in the same breath resist the idolatrous Caesars who think to impose upon us their murders. In our banks, our kindergartens, our picket lines and voting booths, as we worship in our graceful sacred buildings and in our quiet forests and on our frenzied streets, through the seasons of our joy and of our sorrow—in all these, we must remember to welcome ourselves, each other, and all who begin as strangers into the Tent that is open to all. [1]
Richard Rohr describes how each person is created in the Divine image, and is called to participate in the process of growing into God’s likeness:
What does it mean that everything created—everything our eyes can see or have ever seen—is somehow a partial reflection of the image of God? How can something be diverse as all of creation, and at the same time say that reality is more one than many? We say it of God, and we say it of everything our eyes have ever seen.
If we don’t view everything as created in the image of God, what happens? We start picking and choosing: well, that’s created in the image of God, but that is not. But everything, everything, is created in the image of God.
What, then, does likeness mean? In the early centuries of Christianity, the Church Fathers concluded: image was our objective, unquestionable creation as a child or image of God. Likeness was our personal appropriation of that reality. Two people might equally be images of God, but perhaps only one chooses to become kind, forgiving, inclusive, accepting, and patient, full of the great virtues. We already have image, but we grow in likeness. There is a dynamism toward growth, universality, and an infinite love that we can’t get rid of. [2]
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“What is difficult or impossible in one paradigm is easy, even trivial, in another.“
– Joel Barker, Author and Futurist
Over the years, I have come to appreciate the various developmental theories that study how we change and grow throughout our lifetimes. More than a few focus on our worldviews/value systems and reaffirm this comment from Barker…
Sometimes what we need is not so much a quick fix, but an upgrade on the way that we see the world around us. Upgrade the way we see things, and the solution may have been blatantly in front of us the whole time.
Imagine you have a screw that needs tightening, but you have no screwdriver. Perhaps your worldview demands that you find the right screwdriver. However, if you upgrade and are willing to use something other than a screwdriver, perhaps you can use the dime in your pocket or the knife in your drawer to tighten it. Turns out, you didn’t need to have a screwdriver to tighten the screw!
