Ceci n'est pas un dieu.

Several months ago I was visiting the Dallas Museum of Art and came across this painting by René Magritte.

This is not a pipe.

• We are creative. (Dorothy Sayers The Mind of the Maker)  

• We reason and understand. (St. Augustine Confessions)   

• We are relational and yearn to love and be loved.  (Dr. Henry Cloud Changes that Heal)

I hope you will agree that it is not a pipe.  If you put tobacco on it and hold a match to it, it won't respond the way a real pipe would.  (Though if you like playing with fire, that might be fun to try!)  This is, in fact, the mere image of a pipe, and the image of a thing is not the thing itself.

Perhaps the painting stood out to me because I had recently been asked "what does it mean for man to be made in the image of God?"**

Books, dear Reader, books.  Books have been written on this subject by people more educated and thoughtful than I am.  A short list of responses: 

But as I stood turning over in my hands a postcard print of a pipe, I considered simpler things.  I wondered how many images could be produced from a single pipe.  Photos taken from angles above and below.  Close-ups.  An empty pipe.  A smoking pipe.  Variations in light and shadow.  Paintings made in different media.  An infinite number of images can be made from a single pipe, each different from the others and each with its own beauty.

It strikes me that for all the general ways in which every person bears the image of God (creativity, reason, love), there are ways too in which we all uniquely bear the image of God.  Each combination of history, talents, interests, and personality is found in only one person.  

I take it for granted that God cares equally for all his creatures,*** but we find that people have preferences for household pets.  God obviously understands not only the most complicated dynamics of human psychology played out in history, literature and politics,  but he is also up on string theory and the latest stem cell research, while most students will show an aptitude for some subjects over others.  There are a plethora of personality tests which help us describe more completely not only who we are but also who we are not; yet God, I think, is a detail-oriented Type A nurturer with excellent people skills. 

Perhaps in some way, God has sat for his own portrait and we are the resulting snapshots, paintings or pen & ink drawings, none of which can ever describe the whole, but each of which gives a glimpse of some aspect of the real thing.  None of us God, but all of us beautiful to him, and each of us able to convey to the others - simply by our existence without effort on our parts - something of who he is.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

** Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness..." Gen. 1:26 NIV

***  "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care." Matt 10:29 NIV