Pixels

In this image are just 374 of the 32,294,400 pixels in the original photo - .0011% of the image.  Any guesses of what the image is?  It is blue and green - could be water, or a Lego creation, or a photograph of a pack of gum.   

I’ve started reading a book by Cole Arthur Riley entitled, “This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us” and in the first chapter she wrote this:

“Some theologies say it is not an individual but a collective people who bear the image of God. I quite like this, because it means we need a diversity of people to reflect God more fully. Anything less and the image becomes pixelated and grainy, still beautiful but lacking clarity. If God really is three parts in one like they say, it means that God’s wholeness is in a multitude.”  This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley

When I read the bolded line, I just had to stop what I was doing and sit with it for a few minutes.   That line and the whole of that section made me wonder whether I have been speaking something wrong for a long time.  One of the things that I consistently remind people of is how we each bear the image of God and how we are called to see the image of God in others and in ourselves.  That’s not wrong, but it can be heard in a very individualistic way such as “I bear the whole of the image of God wholly and completely in me.”

But Riley lifts up something different here - something beautiful and powerful and true.  We do not individually bear the image of God but instead we collectively bear the image of God.  In the image above, each of those pixels are a beautiful color and pattern in and of themselves, but they are each just one of 32,294,400 that make up the image.  It is not until they are all together that you see the full image.

The 374 pixels above are a tiny rectangle that come from the top right of the bird’s face.  While it seems tiny, it would be noticeable if it wasn’t there.  It is vital to the whole but it is not the whole.

In contrast to this, I remember the craze with “photomosaics” a few years ago where a larger photo would be made up of hundreds or thousands of smaller ones.  A photomosaic, while creative and fun, is the exact opposite of the 374 pixels and the bird image.  In a photomosaic, the smaller pieces are fully individual photos in their own right and then when brought together the larger photo is seen but not sharp or clear.  While you can see a sunflower, or a tiger, or a person’s face, there is an unrealistic and artificial quality to it.  I feel like the photomosaic is the way that I have been sharing about the image of God with others - that when we look closely we see the full, self-contained image within each of us and that when we are all brought together, there’s some sense of commonality and connection but it is not fully whole.

But as Riley shares, maybe it is much more the opposite.  In fact, there are echoes of Martin Luther King’s words from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in what she writes.  In that letter, King says:

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.

Paul speaks of this in 1 Corinthians when he writes of how the Body of Christ is not one member but many that are tied together and that what affects one affects all and that all are inter-related.

In fact, what Riley is sharing is not a new idea but it is at the heart of the Xhosa and Zulu concept of ubuntu which can be partly understood in the concept of “I am because we are.”  Ubuntu de-centers individualism and moves the center to community and inter-relatedness.  It starts with the larger image and recognizes the ways that each pixel makes up the whole rather than how the individual images exist on their own and can come together to make a form of a larger image.

I love that ubuntu is ancient wisdom that continues to speak and continues to be a necessary truth for us today.  It is an ancient wisdom that has spoken across the ages and is possibly in what we read in the Genesis story... “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image,’...So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”  (Genesis 1:26-27).  Is the sense of the “us” a recognition that there is something deeper - an inter-relatedness in God that is then a part of the image that is each of us?   Thank you Cole Arthur Riley for stirring this in me.