The Image of God Appears in the Emptying of the Image

We can become quite attached to the person we believe we are supposed to be. Perhaps we have spent years pursuing the image of someone who is generous, successful, disciplined, spiritually mature, or finally free from the difficulties that have troubled us. We may imagine that if we become this person, something about our lives will eventually settle. Our relationships will become secure, our failures will make sense, and we will no longer experience the uncomfortable contradictions that accompany ordinary life. Yet even our spiritual aspirations can become involved in this effort. We may want to be recognized as humble, admire ourselves for being generous, or become proud of how little recognition we supposedly require.

The eleventh Step of Alcoholics Anonymous concerns seeking conscious contact with God through prayer and meditation. We may imagine that spiritual development involves acquiring a more impressive understanding of God or becoming increasingly successful at living according to our ideals. But what if prayer offers something other than the perfection of the person we have been trying to become? What if it allows us to loosen our grasp upon the very image through which we have been attempting to secure ourselves?

The Christian tradition offers an interesting word for this movement: kenosis, commonly understood as self-emptying. In the Christ hymn of Philippians 2, the movement of Christ is described through relinquishment rather than the pursuit of a more powerful image. Something is surrendered without making surrender itself another achievement. The movement is strikingly downward, not toward becoming greater, but toward entering the vulnerability of ordinary human life.

This language can be misunderstood, particularly by people who have been taught that goodness requires them to disappear for the sake of others. Self-emptying does not have to mean self-hatred, passivity, or the abandonment of desire. Someone who has spent years sacrificing in order to remain loved may already know how dangerous it can be to make self-erasure into a virtue. There must remain someone capable of choosing, acting, loving, refusing, apologizing, and taking responsibility. What may need to be relinquished is not the person, but the demand to become the completed image through which the person hopes to be recognized.

We might consider how often our spiritual lives become organized around something we are attempting to possess. We want certainty about God, assurance that we have been forgiven, or confidence that we are following the correct path. We may become attached to the identity of being faithful, humble, or spiritually advanced. These wishes are understandable, but they can also become another way of avoiding the uncertainty that belongs to our relationships with others.

Prayer may offer an opportunity to remain with uncertainty without immediately converting it into a problem that must be solved. We can encounter disappointment, desire, anger, gratitude, or fear without requiring that each feeling establish something final about who we are. Meditation may allow a thought to arise without treating it as truth, a feeling to emerge without becoming an identity, or a desire to become recognizable without requiring immediate action.

There is something of an open hand in this experience. We do not need to grasp every thought, feeling, or spiritual experience as though our existence depended upon possessing it. Something can arrive, become meaningful, and eventually pass without requiring us to turn it into evidence of who we are.

The Lord's Prayer offers another interesting way of considering this movement. Its language turns toward ordinary human dependence: daily bread, debts, forgiveness, and the conditions through which people remain responsible to one another. We may imagine spiritual life as an ascent away from the troubles of the world, yet the prayer moves toward the ordinary relationships in which we continue struggling to love and be loved. The request that heaven come to earth can be heard as a hope that something different becomes possible within the very circumstances we ordinarily inhabit.

Forgiveness belongs to this movement, although it is more complicated than simply erasing a debt. Someone may have taken something from us that cannot be returned. A relationship may have been damaged, a childhood neglected, or years of trust lost through repeated betrayal. Forgiveness cannot make these things disappear, nor should it become an obligation imposed upon someone who has been harmed.

But what if the absence itself does not have to determine everything that follows? We might discover that life can continue from the place where something remains missing. We may become capable of giving without first requiring every debt to be repaid, receiving without having earned everything we are given, or loving without making another person responsible for restoring what has been lost.

This does not make the loss good or the injury necessary. It suggests that the wound need not become the only source of meaning available to us. Something new may become possible without pretending that what happened can be undone.

The image of God appears in the emptying of the image. This proposition need not settle a final claim about God's nature. It invites us to reconsider the images through which we have expected God, spirituality, and recovery to make us whole. Perhaps our ideals become troublesome when we demand that they provide a completed account of ourselves. We may discover that what matters is less the image of goodness we have achieved than how we are present with others when that image no longer provides certainty.

The work of recovery may therefore move downward, away from grasping and toward a greater capacity to receive. We can continue loving, praying, choosing, and taking responsibility without requiring these acts to establish a permanent picture of who we are. The image remains part of our experience, but we may no longer need to hold it so tightly.

Perhaps prayer begins to change when we stop asking it to make us into somebody and become more available to the people and relationships already before us. The hand opens, not because it has nothing left to receive, but because what it receives no longer needs to be possessed.