Childish Idolatry

Unlike many of my peers at the time, I never had the luxury of believing in a Santa Clause. Nor did I ever truly believe in a Tooth Fairy or Easter Bunny or any of those other magical personalities I’d argue about with my fellow 1st grade classmates. I can remember pondering the concept of Jolly ole St. Nick one Christmas Eve. “How can his reindeer fly?” I thought “if they don’t even have any wings.” This was my reasoning as a very young child. I could have been no more than 5 or 6 at the time, while some may say this premature rationality has robbed me of my innocent and what I’d preferably call the ‘gullible’ stage of childhood.

I can remember one night sitting at home on the kitchen floor with a pencil and piece of notebook paper. At this young I age I can remember attempting to express my artistic abilities, usually with crayon sketches of a favorite cartoon character or some fascinating car or truck. Yet tonight my youthful aesthetic had been focusing on a different genre. “What can I draw if I wanted to draw a picture of God?” I pondered. I had often heard people discuss this “Heavenly Father” in church. Therefore I had concluded that he must be a man, a very big man in the sky. But what did he look like? I remember constructing a visualization of some gray toned cloud-colored man flying among the clouds. Is this what I should draw to illustrate an accurate portrait of “God?” A word I had heard so often in church, or spoken of by my family, and I had heard this name mentioned on T.V. So what does he (or she) look like then? I had never seen a picture of him before. And a new thought occurred to me; I had never seen him for myself, nor had I heard his voice. “So, how can I even be sure that there really is a God? Maybe this God is something like Santa Clause, a Santa Clause for grown people? Maybe he doesn’t even really exist at all? What if he’s just another one of those stories they tell, like Santa Clause or the Boogeyman, one of those stories to make people act good.”

This is the philosophical pondering of the young David Russell. I was left perplexed, baffled at a religious reality and its ideals. I wanted to know how I could draw a portrait of God, something I had never ever seen. Then the thought hit me, “I know, I can ask my mother, she knows a lot of stuff, she’s a grown up.” She enters the kitchen not aware of her agnostic 1st grader’s inquisitiveness. “Mama, what does God look like?” an unanswerable question thrown at her out of nowhere? The next few minutes she tries to explain to a six year old child the concept of an omnipotent, benevolent, invisible, and unfathomable higher being; how people believe he is up there beyond the sky, but no way to provide a young inquisitive mind with a simple picture. No way to provide an elementary student with an elementary validation of God. “So, why would anyone think he’s up there with no way to see him, or touch, or hear him?” I ask.

My mother, her following actions, the wisdom presented in this response, is a memory that I can never forget. For, at the time, the picture she’d draw, God’s picture was beyond my understanding. There, at that age, and for years to come I’d try to figure out what she meant with this simple, untalented, but well drawn portrait. “What do I think MY God looks like?” she asks rhetorically. “This is what I think my God looks like.” On this notebook paper, with a black pen she sketches the picture of a woman; a woman who wore glasses and had long curly hair. “A woman” I responded, “but I thought God was a man.” A woman, as a God? And she said “Her God” at that. But I thought there was only one God. I thought he was THE God. I thought he was everybody’s God. How could the portrait of this woman be her God and only her God? I look down at the picture again, not professionally drawn, but the resemblance of this womanly God to my mother is obvious. The hair was the same, and the glasses; and she had even drawn in the details of those three little brown dots my mother has around her nose.

This answer leaves the young David Russell even more confused. How could God be a woman? A woman that looks like my mama, and why does my mama say that the lady in her picture is her God? Now, being as old as I am, I thought I had a better understanding of what she meant by drawing “her God.” Yet, my mother’s drawn riddle is still not completely solved. Was this a hint at some kind of metaphorical agnosticism? Many of her religious associates would call this act blasphemous, an act of idolatry. Yet, my mother is a regular attendee of our Church. I wouldn’t call her anything near blasphemous, and definitely not skeptical, or agnostic (or at least not openly). So what does this portrait mean? A memory that lingers in my head and still leaves me somewhat perplexed. I’ve never asked her what she meant by drawing a God that looked like her, and I doubt I’ll ever ask her. I think this is just one of those mysteries that will go on throughout the course of history as unsolved, and it may be fitting that it does.