I Don’t Think God Is a Man

I think god made the trees to remind me to breathe
and to stand when everything changes
and to make something majestic
out of this crookedness.

I don’t think god is a man.
I don’t think language can touch the magnitude
of something we weren’t made to understand,
but god gave it to us anyway:

language
and a desire to communicate
and to know and to feel and to plan and to think
to think about thinking and think about living and think about dying
and think about what all this could possibly mean
and to record it all down and share and argue and think more and better and deeper.

And so language cannot be nothing,
even if it cannot be everything.

I don’t think god is a man,
but I think god understands what is man
better than we do,
and I think we understand god
much less than we’d like.

Our grasping and glimpses of knowing cannot be nothing, even if they cannot be everything.

Underneath and behind and obscured by the most visible forms of religion
are centuries of mystics and teachers and rabbis and seekers and doers
servants and lovers and learners and followers
following something so much more and so much greater and realer and truer
than the confident and limited language of the most preeminent religious leaders.

I don’t think god is a man,
but I think god knows the heart of man
and that in touching the heart of man, of our neighboring man, our suffering man,
our enemy man, our fellow man,
we touch god.

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Amber Jimerson is a seeker, student, writer, artist, and mother. She lives with her husband, who is a minister, and their four children. She is the facilitator of a support group for birth parents.