Conversations with Christine
Conversations with Christine, Chapter 6: Redefining God
Christine’s summer semester in Seattle ended in late August. It had been a busy summer for Brett and I as we prepared our West Seattle 1920s bungalow, which we planned to list that fall. Between remodeling our home and preparing for a year-long trip across the United States in a Westfalia camper van, we had a full plate. When Christine flew home to the Sitka Sound in Southeast Alaska to continue her master’s degree through the winter months, I missed her greatly. I was grateful for everything Brett and I had to keep us busy.
After the quick sale of our home, Brett and I began our cross-country trip, an adventure I had dreamed about since I was a teenager growing up in Alaska. We had been married six years by then and I was aware I was trying to experience as many things on my bucket list as I could before starting a family.
We followed the sun down into the canyon lands of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico during the first few months of our journey. As the Christmas holiday approached, we booked roundtrip tickets to Sitka to stay with Christine over her long winter break.
Living in Alaska is a conscious choice for many who decide to call it home. My sister had lived in many places but returned time and time again to the land of the midnight setting sun.
During the early 1990s, certain foods, such as asiago bagels, Parmigiana cheese, and fresh basil, weren’t easily available to those who lived in Southeast Alaska. The Inside Passage of this region was connected by waterways accessible only by plane or boat. Any trip to see my sister required an extra suitcase full of bounty. Besides being able to enjoy the food while we were there, it brought Brett and I great pleasure to make my sister so happy as we unpacked all the specialty foods from her long grocery lists.
After a long day of travel from Arizona to Alaska, we woke up in Sitka the following morning to several feet of snow. A serene calm blanketed the picturesque seaside fishing village adding to its beauty and remote historical charm.
I could hear Christine stoking the wood fire. I knew that we had slept in, for the winter sun was just rising and starting to stream in through the windows. Even with her careful steps, I could hear the wooden floorboards creak as she approached the futon where Brett and I were engulfed in down comforters. She bent over to kiss me, then whispered, “Good morning, Becky. Get up. Let’s be some of the first to walk Totem Park in the fresh snowfall.”
One of my sister’s favorite places was a park in Sitka that was home to Indigenous totem poles from throughout Southeast, Alaska. A visit to Sitka wouldn’t be complete without spending many hours walking the trails and being immersed in the natural beauty of this sacred space.
Once we left Christine’s cottage, we walked side-by-side, not exchanging words. I often followed my sister’s cue and could read her moods fairly well. As we shut the door to her snow-covered home, I knew this was to be a time of sacredness and quiet.
We walked briskly as the cold sea air blasted westward creating offshore winds. I walked as I wrapped my scarf even tighter around my face and checked for gaps where cold air was seeping into my once warm body. The quickened pace helped as I started to warm from the exercise.
We walked down historical Lincoln Street then along the harbor. “If I were to define Heaven here on earth, this would be it.” Christine said as we entered the park and passed a 35-foot red cedar totem pole honoring the raven clan of the Tlingit ancestors.
“I’d love to have a conversation about God, Christine.” I said as I tried to keep up with her pace. Although we were siblings, she was a foot taller than I and her stride was often hard to match. “We were both raised within the Catholic faith, but you use a lot of words like Universe, Source, Cosmos, that hint at a completely different definition than the God that I remember growing up with. When did your beliefs start to shift?”
“The more I studied world religions, mythologies and cosmologies, the more I started to awaken to Universal Truths—what all of these stories had in common. Also, the creation myths of the indigenous people and the land in which you were born contributed to a lot of my definition.” She stopped for a moment as she looked intensely up at the totem pole. “It wasn’t so much that I was redefining God,” she continued, “I was acknowledging that there was something so much more expansive. I think that just like nature, man has tried to conquer what it does not understand.”
Christine continued her quick pace as we entered the park. She slowed as we started to enter the protection of the trees in the park and the bite of the wind was no longer able to reach us, providing a bit of ease from the sting of the cold sea air. She slowed to observe two ravens deep in conversation over a crab that lay between the two of them.
“I’d have to say it was the Eastern philosophies that really helped me redefine the Universe in a way that made sense to me. You yourself have traveled to Bali and experienced the Hindu people and their culture. Their definition of Source is so much more cosmically expansive. They describe a cosmic realm that is infinite, impersonal and is all of existence. They refer to this as Brahman, a term that Meister Elkhart in the 14th century termed, the Godhead, within Christianity. Brahman and the Godhead are formless, genderless, pure consciousness.”
Christine had a destination that she was guiding us to, both in our physical walk and also within our conversation. Soon we arrived at a place deep within the park along a coastal trail that was protected by a forest of sapling trees. She stopped and pulled off her backpack and removed a thermos with an extra cup. She poured hot tea into both cups as she balanced them on the snow-covered log. She screwed the cap back on the thermos and placed it back into her backpack. She then reached down to hand me a cup of hot tea. The way she handed me the cup reminded me of a priest holding a chalice.
“So where does God fit into this cosmic universal source definition that you are describing in Brahman and Godhead?” I asked as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other trying to keep warm. “Was it just me, or did other Catholicism flunkies also miss out on these concepts of God?”
“God is Brahman.” Christine answered as she chuckled. “No, it wasn’t just you, Becky, that had these perceptions of God. Most of Christianity was illiterate and was heavily influenced by historical art.” Christine paused, tossed her tea into the nearby bushes and announced, “Let’s walk while we continue. I’m getting cold.”
“Prior to the 10th century, the early Christians had very few images that represented God,” she continued as we walked along the trail. “They believed, as I do, that God does not have a physical body, a race or gender. That God is pure spirit and within all living things. Early Christians mostly used symbols that implied God was above an earthly realm, such as glowing hands within a cloud, but not as a Caucasian bearded white man on a cloud. That image of God was really influenced by Greco-Roman painters and mosaic tile artists who were depicting God from the context that they understood through their mythology. It makes sense that they would portray God, like they portrayed Zeus.”
As we exited the park en route back home, Christine stopped abruptly and held out her arm to stop me. She then pointed toward an opening in the trees that led to the beach. A bald eagle was perched on a log within twenty feet from us. It was ripping pieces of a salmon with its beak as it held the fish pinned to a driftwood log.
After we watched for awhile, we slowly backed away and continued on our walk. Christine continued. “Then after the 10th Century, artists started turning to the Bible for clues on how to portray God. As far as I can tell, it was really the Renaissance in the 14th century in Italy that really exploded and cemented the concepts of God that you are describing. When you have artists like Michelangelo painting the ceilings of the Pope’s chapel, you pretty much have captured the audience of the world.”
“That makes total sense to me,” I responded.
“Christianity was one thing that survived the fall of Rome in the 5th Century.” Christine continued as we made our way back to her cottage. “After the dark ages, Christians of Europe took their ’show on the road,’ so to speak. Christianity was the dominant religion in all of Europe at that time, so they started to expand globally. With the invention of the printing press, painted illuminations and rough black and white woodcut prints of these early images of God, these visual ideas would have spread and stuck in our minds as to what God looked like.”
“I never even thought to question the origins like you have,” I responded. The brisk walk back to Christine’s home led us through a still sleepy downtown, a completely different scene than in the busy summer months of high tourist season.
“You weren’t alone!” Christine quickly retorted. “Philosophers have been questioning humans’ need to anthropomorphize God for thousands of years, prior to even the visual images starting to appear through art. Humans have a need to make God within their own understanding of what man is. I think these concepts of God are really abstract and it was super hard for mortals to grasp these ideas, so biblical passages were written as metaphors to help uneducated people understand. The challenge now is, how do we get them to not take them literally.”
We had arrived back at her house and had entered into her enclosed porch area where we shook the snow from our boots and unbundled ourselves. “Any chance we could have some of your smoked salmon and bagels for breakfast?” I asked.
Christine smiled and nodded her head yes.
Conversations with Christine Series
Becky has been exploring creativity, spirituality, and the patterns that shape us through her ongoing series, Conversations with Christine. The series imagines two sisters in deep conversation about life’s larger questions, who we are, what shapes us, and why we are here.
Chapter 1: Archetypes, Symbols and Talismans ·
Chapter 2: Defining the Ego ·
Chapter 3: Woundings ·
Chapter 4: Vices and Virtues ·
Chapter 5: The Spiritual Practice of Journaling ·
Chapter 6: Redefining God ·
Chapter 7: Trinities
Chapter 8: Reconnecting
Chapter 9: Evolution of Consciousness
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