What color is your God?
What a silly question!
But is it really that silly? Deities all around the world are known for different and vibrant colors, most notably the South Indian gods and goddesses. Ancient gods were also colorful. Their sculptures, Greek famous marbles, also Egyptian statues of granite or sandstone, we are told, were originally painted. Most of those colors peeled away, but sometimes we know their hues. The Egyptian god Amon was blue, Osiris green. The Greek goddess Demeter and her Asia Minor equivalent Cybele were black, just like some manifestations of the goddess Isis or the mighty Aphrodite and her Syrian counterpart the goddess Anat.
It is especially this divine noble blackness that has survived in religion until now. The divine black was taken over and baptized by ancient and medieval Christians in the form of black Madonnas. I vividly remember one Black Madonna from Prague, standing on a corner above a street just a block from the Mozart Theater. The Polish Solidarity movement formed under the patronage and protection of the even more famous Black Madonna of Częstochowa. There are famous black Madonnas in all Catholic countries: There is one in Eisiedel near Zürich, one in Chartres in France, and Die Schwarze Muttergottes ("Black Mother of God") in Altötting, near München or the black Madonna in Loreto, Italy, or Our Black Lady of Guadalupe in Spain. Their shrines are among the most revered and visited pilgrimage locations.
Protestants, especially Calvinists, could hardly resist sneers over these examples of medieval superstition. But that would be ill informed and itself a form of reverted prejudice. Catholic devotion to black Madonnas preserved something religiously meaningful and deep. The noble black color has elemental divine connections not only in the polytheistic pagan realm but also in the Bible. On the deepest religious levels black is an indicator of something special and archetypal – black is different and beautiful. We only need to take it further, beyond just mere Mariological devotion, all the way back to the center of theology.
So what color is my God? My God is beyond color, and full of colors, rainbow colored, and without doubt, she is also black and beautiful!
What a silly question!
But is it really that silly? Deities all around the world are known for different and vibrant colors, most notably the South Indian gods and goddesses. Ancient gods were also colorful. Their sculptures, Greek famous marbles, also Egyptian statues of granite or sandstone, we are told, were originally painted. Most of those colors peeled away, but sometimes we know their hues. The Egyptian god Amon was blue, Osiris green. The Greek goddess Demeter and her Asia Minor equivalent Cybele were black, just like some manifestations of the goddess Isis or the mighty Aphrodite and her Syrian counterpart the goddess Anat.
It is especially this divine noble blackness that has survived in religion until now. The divine black was taken over and baptized by ancient and medieval Christians in the form of black Madonnas. I vividly remember one Black Madonna from Prague, standing on a corner above a street just a block from the Mozart Theater. The Polish Solidarity movement formed under the patronage and protection of the even more famous Black Madonna of Częstochowa. There are famous black Madonnas in all Catholic countries: There is one in Eisiedel near Zürich, one in Chartres in France, and Die Schwarze Muttergottes ("Black Mother of God") in Altötting, near München or the black Madonna in Loreto, Italy, or Our Black Lady of Guadalupe in Spain. Their shrines are among the most revered and visited pilgrimage locations.
Protestants, especially Calvinists, could hardly resist sneers over these examples of medieval superstition. But that would be ill informed and itself a form of reverted prejudice. Catholic devotion to black Madonnas preserved something religiously meaningful and deep. The noble black color has elemental divine connections not only in the polytheistic pagan realm but also in the Bible. On the deepest religious levels black is an indicator of something special and archetypal – black is different and beautiful. We only need to take it further, beyond just mere Mariological devotion, all the way back to the center of theology.
So what color is my God? My God is beyond color, and full of colors, rainbow colored, and without doubt, she is also black and beautiful!
This Sunday we close the Black
History Month and open our "Lent with the Song of Songs." our theme this Sunday
will be "I am black and beautiful!" (Sol 1:5)
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| The Goddess Isis mourning her brother-lover Osiris. |
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