IMAGES OF GOD IN TIME AND SPACE

Theology Today, Jul 2004 by Henry, Patrick

I detect striking harmonies between the language that seems suited to the new space and time-networks, webs, connections, spirals, loops (the title of Douglas Hofstadter's wonderful book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [1979] comes to mind)-and basic elements of feminist consciousness and criticism. Feminist interpretation of the Bible converges with the new view of space and time. Such interpretation is both a criticism of the Bible's patriarchy, its reinforcement of an image of God that fits a space and time of hierarchy and determinism, and an uncovering of traces of another view better suited to the space and time we now inhabit. This may well be a recovery of a much earlier intuition from an era in which women were in charge (and in which the very notion of "in charge" was radically different from what we think when we hear those words today). If space and time spiral and dance, loop and pirouette, curve and twist and go off in a thousand directions, it's not clear what there is for God to rule, what plans there might be for God to carry out. We find ourselves in a world where God is improviser, storyteller, weaver, imaginer, dramatist. Relationships have priority over order. Lecture formats give way to round-table conversations.

KANSAS AND JERUSALEM

And now I want to circle back to the beginning. Maybe I was too hard on The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy certainly does see in a new way-"There's no place like home." And maybe the point is that she now sees the beauty in the same old drab Kansas that she only wanted to run away from before. In short, one could extricate from the movie as it is the message that I wish it made more explicit. Still, it would be better if the ending were in color.

And yet, might we see in the restraint of The Wizard of Oz an unwitting setting of the stage for a most astonishing switch from black and white to color-at the conclusion of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List? Kansas was colorless to Dorothy at the beginning of her story, but Kansas was just depressing, not lethal, and certainly not genocidal. To portray Kansas in color at the end would have implied that the question was not, "Do I wake or sleep?" but "Am I alive or dead?" It is this latter question-death or life-that was posed in an unremittingly stark way to the Jews in Germany. When Spielberg switches to color as those on the list who are still alive a half-century later visit the Roman Catholic Oskar Schindler's grave in Jerusalem, he is showing us the rainbow after the flood, life after death.

I cannot tell you how my image of God was shaped in that instant when I was surprised, astonished, by Spielberg's sudden use of color. But that my image of God was deepened and broadened, nuanced and further complicated, made happier and sadder, and illuminated and clarified and probably simplified too, I am sure. So, I'm not sorry, after all, that Kansas stayed black and white. It remained for Spielberg's Jerusalem to break through the rainbow-and stunningly. Jerusalem in color is a worthy dividend on Kansas in black and white. As an e. e. cummings poem says in another context: "More than was lost has been found has been found."18 Images of God in time and space are about finding and losing and being found, over and over again.