If you saw God, would you recognize God? What about the Divine in you? What makes you human? What do the mystics say? As the Sufi mystic Hafiz wrote long ago: You are God in drag!
The following is a text version of this blog.
It was the French scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who said: “We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.” While that eloquently captures a foundational understanding of what it means to be human in many of the great wisdom traditions of the world, I prefer the way that Daniel Ladinsky translated the Sufi poet Hafiz on the topic of who we are as human beings. In this translation, Hafiz tells us: You are God in drag!
Throughout our lives, we’ve been taught that who we are as people simply isn’t good enough. There are clear religious messages about this, like dogmas that state we are born with the stain of original sin or that we are fundamentally depraved from our birth. In the West, parenting was understood as raising and training children, implying that children have to be tamed rather than supported as they grow. Capitalism builds on these beliefs by convincing us that we aren’t good enough unless we have the latest products, clothing, and lifestyle. While some Westerners seek solitude in Eastern religion, elements of this depreciation of our worth are found there as well. After all, to seek “enlightenment” means that on our own, we are un-enlightened and missing something significant about life. In all of these tradition, who we are as people and our worth is depreciated.
In the early 1980s, popular spiritual writer, Matthew Fox, coined the phrase, “original blessing,” to counter the focus on original sin and the Christian theological focus on our having fallen from God’s good graces. His work has been helpful to many people. But I want to suggest that the spiritual masters push us further and challenge us to understand that the core of our being is nothing less than Divine.
At the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a beautiful explanation of who we are as human beings. In the ancient text from the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Genesis, the “book of beginnings,” we find an allegory about the creation of human beings: that God formed us out of clay and breathed into us the breath of life, making us living souls. This allegory conveys that what enlivens us is the breath, the essence, of God. It is this same allegory that explains that each of us is made in the image and likeness of God.
There’s another allegory in the Book of Genesis that conveys a story of creation as occurring over a series of days. In this allegory, everything that is created is said by God to be good. But humanity is said to be very good.
Rather than chasing after something to make us whole, to make us better, to make us complete, the starting place for us is that we are already whole, complete, and very good. There is something of the Divine in each of us. In that truth, we need to live in a secure way as we grow to our full potential.
Hafiz, a Sufi teacher and Muslim, conveys this in a very startling way:
“You are a divine elephant with amnesia
trying to live in an ant
Hole.
Sweetheart, O sweetheart
You are God
in Drag!”
Our spiritual growth must be rooted in the fundamental truth of who we are. We can say it in different ways, but it’s all the same thing. You are the image of the Divine. You are a spiritual being having a human experience. You are God in drag. It’s all about who you are most deeply.
Growing past the lessons we’ve learned that have caused us to depreciate ourselves, our own worth, takes time, regular spiritual practice, and sometimes some counseling, and the process is often supported through work with a spiritual director. Just like growing flowers in a garden, all of these tools till the soil of our inner life and fertilize it so that beautiful growth occurs on days of both sunshine and rain. Give yourself that chance to be who you were created to be.