Father Jim McDonald posed this question in his August 3, 2025 sermon and encouraged us to reflect on it and get back to him with our thoughts. “What image or images come to mind that represent the Divine, or God, for you?”
When I first did this I came up with the image of the ocean, vast, ever changing and to me peaceful. Then as I was driving home listening to my YouTube Sunday’s service playlist the song Everything's Alright from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar came on and I got the image of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. I find God in the image of cats just being felines. I find God in the image of me and besties Sarah and Mariko taken at my 53rd birthday and remembering how much fun we had that day.
I see divine images from other cultures too. Yes I am an Episcopalian Straight From the Cradle and until the grave and Beyond. However, I still honor other cultures’ images of the Divine: Buddha, Shakti, Shiva, Lakshmi, Gaia, and Native American Shamans to name a few.
One image that came to me at 11:30 the night after the sermon was of agent Smith from the movie The Matrix and specifically from Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, the second and third movies in the franchise. If you haven't seen the movie, basically the character has the ability to reach into another person who is in The Matrix and replicate himself and what you see is then this person becomes another Smith to the point that at the end of the third movie there's like thousands of them.
In the end, the image of the divine is as Julia Roberts’ character says in the movie and the book Eat Pray Love FatherJim McDonald posed this question in his August 3, 2025 sermon and encouraged us to reflect on it and get back to him with our thoughts. “What image or images come to mind that represent the Divine, or God, for you?”
When I first did this I came up with the image of the ocean, vast, ever changing and to me peaceful. Then as I was driving home listening to my YouTube Sunday’s service playlist the song Everything's Alright from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar came on and I got the image of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. I find God in the image of cats just being felines. I find God in the image of me and besties Sarah and Mariko taken at my 53rd birthday and remembering how much fun we had that day.
I see divine images from other cultures too. Yes I am an Episcopalian Straight From the Cradle and until the grave and Beyond. However, I still honor other cultures’ images of the Divine: Buddha, Shakti, Shiva, Lakshmi, Gaia, and Native American Shamans to name a few.
One image that came to me at 11:30 the night after the sermon was of agent Smith from the movie The Matrix and specifically from Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, the second and third movies in the franchise. If you haven't seen the movie, basically the character has the ability to reach into another person who is in The Matrix and replicate himself and what you see is then this person becomes another Smith to the point that at the end of the third movie there's like thousands of them.
In essence, my image of the divine is everything everywhere all at once. Or put it another way as the author of Eat Pray Love wrote: God dwells within me as me.
