The great contemplatives of Christianity described their profound experiences of union with God, but the very nature of those experiences made it impossible for them to define or describe the One with whom they were in one-ness. 

The sixth-century Christian mystic known as Dionysius, whose work informed much of the contemplative tradition of the faith that followed, wrote a long paragraph explaining what God is not, including these lines: “…nor can (God) be expressed or conceived, since (God) is neither number nor order, nor greatness nor smallness; nor equality nor inequality, nor similarity nor dissimilarity…”

Teresa of Avila, similarly, referring to contemplative prayer, said: “In this state there is no feeling, only enjoyment without any understanding of the thing in which the soul is rejoicing. It understands that it is enjoying some good in which all good is gathered together, but this good is incomprehensible.”

St. John of the Cross, on his allegorical drawing of the trail to the top of Mount Carmel wrote: “ni eso – ni eso – ni eso – not this, not this, not this.” To meet God, one must let go of all assumptions and attachments along the way. One must seek nothing and nobody.

So, any image of God, any icon that purports to image God, even Rublev’s beloved icon of the Trinity, is fundamentally flawed. At best icons are signposts pointing to a path.

Our first reading today is allegedly a pre-Christian Celtic canticle pointing to the divine path, using the ‘I am’ phrase like in John’s Gospel, which by the sheer diversity of the ‘I am’ statements – from creatures to created matter, from knowledge to fire in the head, from a murmur to a beam – deconstructs any fixed notion of what or who God is. In this sense then the writer Amergin, I would suggest, pre-figures the later Christian mystics.

I am left wondering how Amergin would have us pray? How do you pray to a God whoi s wild and undomesticated; who is terrible and untameable; who creates fire in the head; who is one thing and then another?

What so often happens in Christian prayers is that we melt down such ferocity (and all the unexplainable bits we don’t like) and recast the deity in the mold of acceptability, so we can get a handle on God, so we can (pretend, I think) to know God.

I think the last lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s great hymn, drawing on the Elijah story, point to the path of journeying into God, listening/feeling it all, being in silence, and then (maybe, if we’re lucky) hearing that still small voice of calm. Note Elijah didn’t talk at God, but waited in silence.

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The biblical reading today (Exodus 32) is the story of the Golden Calf. In verses 19 & 20, Moses in his wrath broke not only the golden calf but also the sacred tablets of stone upon which were inscribed the ten commandments that he had brought down from Mt Sinai (the same mountain on which Elijah would later hear the ‘still small voice’). Maybe Moses thought why have commandments when there is no perception of the vastness of God, and people just want an earth-bound, created image to worship?

The story of the Golden Calf is a tale of human need for security and surety, the allure of the tangible, and the desire to get a God you can handle. Or affix a handle to.

Iconography, the art of making beautiful two-dimensional images that point to, or invite the pilgrim to see through them into, something of the ways and wonder of God, has always been a dangerous undertaking. For people literalize. They mistake the image for t he real (not unlike much social media today). And when the image begins to resemble a shut door rather than an open window (an end rather than a beginning), then people have begun to leash and muzzle God (to use a dog metaphor).

And then it’s time for iconoclasm – the breaking of images.

Some of our Presbyterian forebears took iconoclasm literally, had an awful smashing time, destroying a lot of art and beauty, in the name of liberating God (while at the same time constraining God within a straitjacket of words and ideas they found in the Bible).

Though I empathize with the notion that God can’t be captured in art, it was a pity our forbears didn’t realize that God could be glimpsed. Or better, paths to God could be glimpsed. Their vandalism robbed so many of the living and yet to be born of wonderful ‘prayers’ in paint and stone.

I wish they had realized that iconoclasm is really a discipline of the mind and heart.

Some years ago, I sat with a student who was learning to be a minister. Before he began his training he had never heard of God seriously addressed as “She.” To merge into the culture of the University’s theology department, and to be sensitive to the spiritual sensibilities of other students, he told me that now he occasionally addressed God using feminine pronouns. Like many students before him, of whatever denomination, when he came to leave the theological incubator, I surmised that he would leave those pronoun supplements behind.

I invited him to consider a path of prayer, and for a period of two months to put on “She”, like most ministers put on robes or a suit before a service. I invited him into the discomfort, the disorientation, and the feeling of artificiality. For when you put on feminine pronouns in sermons and liturgy you become acutely aware of your dependency on maleness. I invited him to walk a very different path, that would lead him to grieve the absence of a male God that he would have previously denied he had.

The purpose of this discipline was not to ‘convert’ him to a female God, but to help him to see and then break free of the ‘God Father’ who dominated his prayers and indeed still continues to lord it over much of the Christian religion.

The maleness of God, ‘Father God’, is an icon. As an icon it is helpful to many people. It says that God is not far away, but intimate, accessible, protecting, comforting. For some people though the ‘Father God’ icon has the opposite effect. It reminds them of fathers who were far from God, and some who thought they were God. And of course, Mother God, Brother God, and Sister God would also offer images of intimacy, accessibility, protection, and comfort.

People confuse the image with the reality. Too many people discard Christianity when it seems like a nonsense praying to “Our Father which art in heaven”. (As I inferred last week, heaven is also an image rather than a reality, pointing to the divine being uncircumscribed by our human systems). People mistake the icon, the signpost, for that being pointed to.

Some of us Christians spend their whole life praying to a male god. They use that one icon all their life. And while they might not think of their God as male, the image infiltrates their subconscious, and restricts God to a particular boundary. Others of us are not content to stay with one icon or to stay with any anthropomorphic icon.

As we travel the path of faith, we find images can both guide and restrict us. Faith requires us both to hold on to images for a time, and then also to let goof them.

The final thing I want to say about icons is that some icons are themselves iconoclastic:

I think Rublev’s Trinity, portraying three non-binary beings in community, is breaking the image of a divine hierarchy of Father, then Son, then subservient Spirit. And Robert Lentz’s icon of three women of different ages and cultures birthing and nurturing the world pushes trinitarian understanding even further.

Similarly, I think some icons of female saints, depicted as authoritative and operating outside the bounds of both convention and male control (which are often the same thing), are breaking with the icons/images of ‘meek and mild’, do-as-you’re-told, notions of femininity. Like St Brigid of Kildare. Or like Robert Lentz’s icon of the 3^rd century martyrs, Perpetua and Felicity, whose race and relationship cross boundaries of class and gender.

Similarly, I think some of the icons of political activists, seeking a common good that is not the good the powerful champion, are also breaking with the icons/images of obeying the law, being humble and compliant. Like the icon of Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador who died because he defended the poor and incurred the wrath of El Salvador’s leaders, and the icon of Dorothy Day who began the Catholic Worker movement and sided with American unions.

Icons have the ability to not only point out paths others have followed to God, but to also question the path we are on.