Reflection in a Basin: My Share in the Image of God
I was six-years-old.
After a great day of playing with my childhood best friend, David, we woke from a deep nap. David’s (now sainted) grandmother stirred us from sleep so we could have a snack. As we woke, we talked about the dreams we had just had while sleeping. She listened as one unintentionally overhears a conversation in an adjacent room. When she heard what I had been dreaming, she instructed me to tell her what I had just recalled to David. She suddenly called my parents with tears in her eyes and instructed me again–
“Tell them what you just told me. Tell them your dream.”
I obeyed.
My parents wept, thanking God through tears and praising God through catch-breaths only found in crying. The dream I rehearsed moved them; it accessed a part of their hearts that was hitherto unknown to me. So all of this crying was curious to me, a six-year-old Black boy telling dream stories with his best friend. I would learn, though, the great consequence of this experience to my identity in the world.
In my dream, Jesus appeared to me and told me to go tell everyone about him.
I do not recall this dream. I wish I could. Details of this vision have been lost in my memory through time, desperate distraction, quiet questions, and periodic passions. I am no longer able to recall the quality of Jesus’ voice, the look in his eyes, the color of his clothes. Yet, what I have always remembered, – however latently or variedly my memory serves – is the profound nearness of the Lord in the person of Jesus. His presence has remained to me a peculiar distinction from others I’ve encountered; yet it has been intimately situated in every heart. The whole of my life has been spent in the profound and visceral awareness that Jesus is God, that he is the ultimate reality within which “I live, move, and have my being.” (Acts 17:28) This awareness may be thought of as a familiar touch that is no longer pressed against your skin. The shape of his hands – the impact of his voice – on my heart and my physical body have left an unforgettable imprint and impression on me. I have lived in pursuit of the recreation of that hand’s (voice’s) authority, control, and concern on me.
When I try to re-imagine the image of Christ as revealed to me in my childhood dream, I find myself reflecting on contemporaneous images of Jesus. Indeed, I am wont to recall Jesus as a white man of European descent with long, brown hair and blue eyes. His voice, imaginarily, resounds a lyric baritone when speaking; and his attire frequents sandals with straps and a white cloak. Even as I write, I find the images of Jesus that I hold maintain some consistency with my childhood perceptions of Jesus – this, in that I concede my mental image of him to current representations in media and broader society (for example, actor Jonathan Roumie’s presentation of Jesus in the show The Chosen). But these images challenge me.
I am a Black man in America. I descend from a Black sharecropper in the early-twentieth century in this country and a Puerto Rican immigrant from a (now) commonwealth of this country. My surname, Alvarado, is the emblem of an elemental current of Latinx passion in my heart; my complexion is a portrait of African-American pride calcified in my bones. The convergence of both at my birth is a testimony of rich faith, dogged determination, stout resistance to unfavorable circumstances, and a firm conviction to live and not die. These qualities, uniquely formed in my mother’s womb, left to the stewardship of she and my father, are threaded through the hearts of each of my ancestors.
How, then, could I be expected to locate myself in the likeness of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white man supposed as the Divine? How could I surrender the value of my hue to a society who has never known how to properly esteem it? Where is my reflection? Would I cast myself as pearls before swine? Am I subject to the shame of singing the Lord’s song in a strange land (Ps 137:4)?
Certainly not; my erasure is a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit who conspired with God at creation to breathe me into existence. It is false witness against the Divine Potter and denial of the legitimacy of his workmanship in my Black body. I must obey the mandate of scripture, to “present [myself] as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, for this is [my] reasonable service” (Rom 12:1). Protecting the image of God in my melanin against the blasphemy of sentiments like, “I don’t see color;” “All Lives Matter;” and “Why let your racial identity matter more than your Christian identity?” is a unique anointing from the God who formed humanity from the colored clay of the earth.
It is impossible for me to embody an indwelt Messiah whose existential frame is entirely antithetical to my own. It seems, therefore, right that the browning of the Christ become a central pillar – a load-bearing structure – of my spiritual formation. (After all, Paul instructs that we work out our own faith in fear and trembling.) This process is an extension of the pursuit of truth through the history of the church by personalizing it as my history as well. A savior who requires my melanin to evaporate or become secondary to my identity in the world is rather more my captor – rather more my prison than my safe place wherein my being may live and move. If, in the beginning, “all things were made through him,” (John 1:3) – including me – then some part of him must show forth my Blackness.
Throughout my life, my church community has taught me to shift emphasis away from rigid physical identities beholden to white American norms and expectations. I have learned to lean away from typified – and, even, erroneous – representations of the ancient Palestinian Jew as fair-skinned and silk-haired. I am still learning to rely less on specifics surrounding his phenotypical and manifest self-presentation (read: self-revelation); instead, I am choosing to pursue the consistencies of Christ’s consciousness and character in the words, images, and worship experiences I encounter. The lived religion of my community has equipped me with an ever-evolving set of tools of embodiment (dancing, singing, waving hands, kneeling at the altar) to interpret the scriptures and Divine experiences. I am learning God as my all in all by humbly observing God in others. Thereby, I embrace the “multitude of counsel” in which “there is safety” (Prov 11:14).
What of my six-year-old dream, then? How was I able to recognize the Divine’s image underneath my presuppositions of Jesus’ (whitewashed) likeness? And is it possible to complete all of the undoing necessary to behold him as he truly is?
Yes, it is.
Simply, I must hold my position for footwashing: I must allow Christ to become to me as I ultimately am to him – a servant. I dare not reject his efforts to reveal himself to me – as me –or else my living is in vain. In this position, I may receive his words over my flesh:
“If I do not wash you, you have no share with me. The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but is completely clean. And you are clean.”
I have discovered that he may indeed be found, and I with him; for my image is emblazoned in the face of the Divine. I may once again recognize his presence by allowing my vitality to expand in pursuit of Jesus’ earliest directive to me: “Go tell everyone about me.” I choose, then, to be fully present as a testimony of my dream that I may better serve others in continued obedience.
