🔥 A Tender Apocalypse – If God Walked Among Us
Imagine, for a moment, that the Divine learns to dress down. Not in robes of unquestionable glory, but in smudged jeans and a thrift-store jacket – hands that remember both labour and mistakes. Imagine this being – call them Jesus, Krishna, Shiva, Durga, simply the one who remembers – choosing, deliberately, to appear unremarkable. No thunderclaps. No light shows. Just a quiet body that hurts, laughs, forgets deadlines, pays bills late, gets enraged and tender in the same afternoon...
Would you believe?
We expect the Sacred to arrive as the specta-perfectular – clean, flawless, superior. We confuse perfection with proof. We measure divinity by superpowers, as if holiness required spectacle. But what if the whole point of incarnation were the opposite?
What if the Divine wanted to teach us our divinity by being 'fallible'?
If God stood next to you at a bus stop and fumbled with exact change, would that be less true than a voice from a cloud? Or would it be more persuasive – because it shows that being human and being sacred are not opposites but overlapping circles of the same truth?
To see divinity in an ordinary, imperfect life is to be invited to see it in your own. And the disbelief that God could stand beside you, ordinary and awkward, is really a disbelief in your own worth. If you reject an unvarnished, vulnerable Divine, do you not quietly say that holiness must look like superiority? That worthiness must be visible?
The deeper unbelief is not about God; it’s about whether you will allow your own human mess to be a vessel for the Sacred.
Because such a being would not come to demand worship, but to invite loyalty to yourself. Their presence would not ask you to kneel, but to stand. To believe in them would only ever be a doorway to believing in your own divinity, your own equal worth, your unshakable place in existence. The highest honour would not be kneeling before them – it would be standing fully as yourself. 🥹
🥸 An undercover God
Imagine an undercover God – present in the supermarket queue, the call centre, the backroom staff meeting. Not as a test, not as a trick, but as a radical experiment in authenticity.
If everyone knew who they were, performances would begin instantly: displays of piety, humble brags, ritualized kindness. People would audition for God’s favour instead of being themselves.
So the Divine might choose anonymity out of compassion: to create a space where true selves might appear, unstage-managed. Authenticity is all that matters – it is the deepest offering, the truest measure of presence. The rest is illusion.
😵💫 We Close Our Eyes By Thinking We See
What if this incarnation revealed itself only through language — stories, questions, silences – refusing spectacle? We love to script the Divine. We think we know how God should and would sound, act, intervene.
That certainty – the “I already know” – is often what stops us from hearing. When the Sacred speaks in ambiguity, our first instinct is to discredit, to institutionalize. We want proofs because proofs are safer than transformation.
So yes – a God who only speaks might be dismissed as mad, or arrested as dangerous, or ridiculed as naive. Prophets often were. Many truths arrive first as heresy. Perhaps transformation was never meant to be a single lightning strike but a slow unfolding – whispers, gestures, tiny openings of heart.
Maybe the Divine prefers patience over spectacle, trusting that small revelations endure where revolutions fade.
And perhaps that’s what ancient wisdom keeps whispering:
The Hebrew Yahweh – “I am, the One who is” – and the Sanskrit Soham – “I am that” – both point to the same truth. It’s not about venerating someone else; it’s about recognizing yourself. Standing fully in your being – both finite and infinite, humble and magnificent, here and now.
And if you need a modern chorus: Peter Tosh sang “I am that I am”, Gloria Gaynor declared “I am what I am” — both remind us: holiness, divinity, and presence are not about performing for someone else or living up expectations. They are about being fully, unmistakably yourself.
The Sacred in the Marketplace
And what would such a presence mean in a world like ours — where worth is measured in numbers? Imagine the embodied Divine – imperfect, human, eloquent, uncompromising – pointing to the heart of exploitation and saying: Stop.
The merchant tables would tremble. The rhetoric of profit-at-any-cost is not just economics; it’s metaphysics. It shapes what we believe is real and valuable.
A visible, vulnerable God who refuses to sanctify accumulation would be a threat to every structure built on separation and scarcity. Power fears questions more than it fears swords. It would try to domesticate the figure into a harmless icon – or erase them altogether.
And fear would not live only in the powerful. Many who benefit would cling to their narratives; many who have little would fear the unpredictable. We often attack before we listen, especially when the stranger doesn’t fit our script. (The film Arrival showed this perfectly – first response: hostility. We are still learning...)
🌈 A Tender Apocalypse
This thought experiment is not about politics or prophecy – it’s about an inner economy: the cost of forgetting your own divinity.
If God showed up as ordinary and you still refused to believe, the loss would be yours – a deeper unbelief in your own sacred potential.
If many believed, what an undoing that would be: systems of shame and scarcity would shake; presence would matter more than product, relationship more than ROI.
The true scandal of an imperfect God is not the absence of miracles, but the demand for participation. Their miracle would be to reveal that holiness is messy, touchable, available – not a prize for purity, but the baseline of being.
To recognize them is to recognize yourself.
Belief, then, is not about bowing – it is about remembering.
That to be flawed is not to be less divine; it is to be the exact container for compassion, courage, and the small rebellions that change the world: a spoken apology, an unpaid lunch, a table turned over when greed sits at it.
If God came wearing human skin, borrowed clothes, and whispered, “I am like you”, would you hear the invitation to see your own divinity, your worth, your power, your true greatness? Would you join the slow, tender revolution of seeing and being seen?
Or would you demand proof so loud that you miss the quiet proof standing beside you?
Wake up. Look in the mirror. Look next to you. The Sacred might be tripping over its shoelaces – and that is exactly the point. 🕊️✨
❤️💛💚
Yours and mine,
I & I 🦁
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