Despair Is When a Reflection Tries to Do Its Own Thing
By: Jonas Ellison
Tags: Life, Christianity, Ideas, Faith, Religion

The verse from Genesis 1 about us being created in God’s image sounds beautiful. But it’s hard (impossible?) not to wonder how this is the case when we’re so messed up as humans.

How can you tell me that I’m the image of God when I just flipped off a school bus driver yesterday (I did it a few seconds after he drove by me, so don’t worry, neither he or the kids saw it).

How can you tell me that we are created in God’s image when there are over 70 million people (double the level recorded 20 years ago) on our beautiful, bountiful planet who are displaced from their families fleeing war, conflict, and persecution as I write this?

The way it seems to me — if I’m/we’re an image of God, we’re all in big trouble. It means that this hope that Jesus brought was total nonsense and he died in vain.

But then it hit me (as it sometimes does, but not always). And please know that what I’m about to share does NOT put this thing to rest. I’m convinced that we humans will be shaking our fists at the sky until the end of time.

Maybe instead of ‘image’, the writers of this poem in Genesis meant to say something more like ‘reflection’ (note: this is not a scholarly researched piece and I didn’t look into the translation of the text).

A reflection is like the imprint of our t-shirt in the mirror or on the surface of a pond. In reality, my shirt says ‘Carhart’, but the reflection says ‘trahraC’ with the letters turned inside out (just kidding, I wish I had a Carhart t-shirt, but I don’t). My reflection looks and moves just like me, but the image is inverted.

Maybe that’s us. Maybe our human state is that of a reflection of the one who looks into the pond. And as reflections of the divine, we humans have its likeness but are also very bass-ackwards and inside-out — maybe not in a physical sense, but in a psycho-spiritual way. We are inverted images of the divine, perfect in every way, but also inside-out.

And then we have those moments...

Those divine moments when we’re still and we know our place — not as individual actors and manipulators, but as mere reflections. We notice that the words written in our hearts may seem inverted, but they mean something and are tied directly to something bigger and more solid than we are.

If this is the case — if we’re reflections of our creator — there’s nothing we can do to not be reflections.

The only thing different between us and a real reflection like we see in the pond is that we somehow have the ability to think that we’re not reflections and are, instead, the source of ourselves.

If we’re inverted reflections of the divine, it’s not so much of a ‘flaw’ or a ‘problem’ so much as a misunderstood state of being.

If my hunch is accurate, there are no spiritual/secular exercises we can do to reverse our reflection-like state. No matter how many creeds I say, kale chips I force down, or how much ayahuasca I ingest, I will always be a reflection.

I see the ‘problem’ not as one of mistaken word or action at the root but rather a misunderstood identity. We’re like reflections who somehow gained the ability to imagine that we are individual and autonomous actors and thinkers. This is what the poets were trying to tell us when they wrote about the garden. We ate the fruit and started thinking that we were other than the reflections that we were. We thought that we could do a better job than the one staring into the puddle, so to speak… That we could live, act, and move separately from our source.

And so, the more we think we’re the ones doing the ‘right things’ to achieve the impossible task of becoming less reflection-like, all we’re effectively doing is mentally/spiritually walling ourselves off from our fellow reflections.

I think Jesus came to remind us of who we are and that it’s not our fault for being in the peculiar position we’re in where the more we gnash our teeth and try to accomplish the impossible task of being autonomous non-reflections, the more despair we fall into.

Why are we in this state?

I don’t know, obviously. But maybe this is the only way that God can see us and delight in God’s creation, by placing us outside of Godself as living reflections in the pond. And just like our reflections can’t possibly see us, perhaps that’s why we can’t see God. And maybe God wanted to know through us what it felt like for a reflection to know what it was like to be a reflection — perfectly safe in the image of its creator.

If I’m even close with this metaphor, it’s not you or I who move and act and think and dance in front of the mirror, but God. Any notion of a separate ‘me’ acting apart from the origin of the reflection is merely a delusion that leads to despair. Because reflections can only be that which their true nature is — reflections.

The devil as stone-thrower

I believe in the devil... I’m no liberal, theologically speaking.

Seriously though, how can I not see the devil and demons and poltergeists and all of hell’s minions in the world around me?

But in the light of this metaphor, I see what the devil’s role may be. I see the devil as one who stands at the other side of the psycho-spiritual pond and throws rocks in.

So what the devil is doing through the death and destruction in the world isn’t shattering or breaking God’s image. It’s impossible to break a reflection no matter how big of a rock you throw in the pond. But if the reflection was given a consciousness, it’d be a terrifying situation, seeing oneself shattered and scattered across the surface of the water. This is the despair that we all know. The inner movements we distract ourselves with news and snaps and chats and the like.

But then comes the stillness. Those holy moments when the water calms and we feel whole and safe knowing that when the water stills, this state is what we’ll always return to.

Again, maybe this is where Jesus comes in —

as one who stood beside the One looking into the pond

and was sent into the pond to live as a True reflection would

and be hated and killed for it

and to forgive and rise in spite of it

so as to show us our true nature

and calm our disillusioned minds.

But being inverted beings, it was hard to communicate to us in a way that we could understand. And so his best way to do that was to let the stone-induced ripples take him up to the place where he and all of us are from.

He told us not to despair during the times when stones are being thrown and the ripples across our waters scatter us, but to rest in the stillness that comes when we surrender our autonomy and know that our source and reality exists in the one who looks so lovingly at us in the pond.

In him, we learned that there was more than life as a reflection. And we saw that we’d soon return to our source that stands outside of the tumultuous waters around us.

I pray for more and longer periods of stillness. When the waters of our souls still and we remember who we are through the one sent in to be a reflection beside us. Because if we could get this, maybe we’d know our true identity. And maybe then, we wouldn’t be as rattled. And the devil wouldn’t get as much of a thrill out of our anxiety and despair. And he’d go find something better to do with his time.

Amen.