The Colors of God

Drive through any city or town and through much of the countryside in America and you will see churches, chapels, synagogues, temples and other places of worship. In front of many of the buildings are signs about God and what those who worship at that place consider to be the right way to worship their version of a deity as well as how to live and die. Certainly it was as a child that I first heard about people talking about their version of God. Back then people were much more careful about who heard them talk about God and religion as those were not considered items for polite discussion outside of ones’ family and close friends. I was told some people took themselves and their religions too seriously. Their church walls might be plainer than ours’, lacking stations of the Cross and side altars, but they were too deeply indoctrinated in whatever it was their ministers preached. They needed to lighten up, have a burger and beer, and watch some sports. They needed to go dancing, smoke a cigarette and have a highball, all things which we Catholics did, but our Christian relatives and friends did not do because those things were considered sinful in their religions.

Over the last fifty years Americans attend religious services less than since the settling of the West in the nineteenth century. Many houses of worship have closed. But the ones that remain still have the traditional signs, tapestries and other paraphernalia of their particular sect. I have worshiped in buildings as spartan as the abbey church at New Melleray where the walls in are glass and field stone. It is very plain and simple like Quaker meeting houses. I have also worshiped in Orthodox churches where the walls are decorated with the ikonostasis and ikons showing scenes from the Bible and saints’ lives.

I have been in buildings where the walls are painted shades of white, green, gray and goodness knows what else. Some buildings have plain walls. Others, like the Orthodox churches, are more highly decorated.

People talk about seeing signs of God all over the walls when they walk into houses of worship. They say the walls have God all over them. I wonder what color they see God.

My experience is that God shows up in many different ways. Sometimes he anthropomorphizes. I see God in human form even though God has neither form nor shape. I hear God communicate to me in ideas without words. We think of people who read minds, telepaths. Consider this to be a form of mutual telepathy. With God, the angels and spirits we…