Thirty Days with Mary Magdalene

Day Twenty-three

Many of us hold to a particular mental image of. God. The most cliched is of the old bearded man in the clouds, such as featured in Michelangelo's famous Creation of Adam fresco. Our particular image tends to be affected by cultural bias, which results in the blond-haired blue-eyed white Jesus kind of portrayals both in art and cinema. For a long time, having watched Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth as a child, Jesus for me looked like actor Robert Powell! But these images can serve to reinforce the idea that divinity is separate from us. We cling to the image and that blinkers our vision. For the wonderful truth is that God is everywhere. She lives in us, through us, as us. She is the wind, the rain, the birdsong and the laughter of children. She is the homeless man in the street corner, the widow, the unloved and the destitute. She is the Kingdom and the Queen of the Kingdom. And she is not least the voice of our own soul, the whisper of true understanding that speaks softly but surely, 'I am.'