A friend showed me a CNN video clip the other day about a 12 year old child prodigy artist named Akiane Kramarik. At the age of four Akiane had an experience of God, even more extraordinary given that she was raised in a home where faith was not practiced or discussed. Her mother had been raised atheist, and her father was a former Catholic. (See article in Christianity Today.) In the CNN interview, speaking of when Akiane first started describing the visions, Akiane's mother tells the reporter, "I knew it was real to her, the things she had seen and the places she had visited." Through their daughter's experience of God, Akiane's parents have found/renewed their own faith in God. While Akiane enjoys painting portraits and animals, she also started to paint her visions. Through the visions Akiane felt called to help others, not only through her artwork, but also actively working to relieve suffering in the world. She gives a portion of the proceeds of her artwork to charity and is hoping to start building hospitals in Lithuania (her mother's home country) and will soon begin a tour to raise money to alleviate suffering from AIDS in Africa.

In addition to the paintings themselves, Akiane would pray, reflect, and write poetry about the paintings. Akiane explains that her poetry writes about the suffering and the hardship of humankind; her art shows the hope. About a painting titled, "Divine Knowledge," Akiane writes:

"This painting was particularly hard for me, because I have changed it so many times and ended up using two models and two completely different backgrounds. It took me a few months to paint its full meaning and another five months of prayer to fully understand it. This is the painting about search for divine knowledge.The young sculptor represents our civilization mostly ruled by the male. His youth shows that our civilization is still immature. The sculptor is chiseling a huge heap of coal in order to find the diamond representing divine knowledge. The sculptor ignores the pain, strain, hardship and temptation of everything surrounding him. All he focuses on is on finding this particular diamond, and he knows that if he chisels long enough through the black coal layers, representing human knowledge, he will finally see the diamond of divine knowledge. In the background of a cave"

The poem she writes with the painting states:

“…Only from the deep coal tunnels
White diamonds come.
But only by the light
They are recognized…”

Akiane tells CNN that her vision of heaven is vivid and full of color, more colors than we can even imagine. God she describes as "bold light, pure, really masculine, really strong and big." I write about Akiane both because her story and her work touched me deeply, but also because it gives me an opportunity to talk about visions and images of God. If you or I were to have a vision of God, there is a good chance that God would not look to us as God looks to Akiane. God is imageless, and so when a person has a vision, God works through the person's imagination, which is not to say the vision is "made up". God works through the person's own consciousness and the concepts or experiences the person has at her disposal as well as through the subconscious. Many mystics have visions of God, but rarely do two mystics describe God in the same way. Often times words fall short of describing the experience.

Julian of Norwich had many visions of "showings" of God. In her writing about on of her visions, she states:

"As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother, and he revealed that in everything, and especially in these sweet words where he says: I am he; that is to say: I am he, the power and goodness of fatherhood; I am he, the wisdom and lovingness of motherhood; I am he, the light and the grace which is all blessed love; I am he, the Trinity; I am he, the unity; I am he, the great supreme goodness of every kind of thing; I am he who makes you to love: I am he who makes you to long; I am he, the endless fulfilling of all true desires."

Our images of God tell us about our relationship to God, and they also tell us a lot about ourselves. When I taught theology, I would ask my students to describe God for me. I would write the characteristics they said on the board: powerful, loving, just, compassionate, strong, etc. Then I would ask, for each trait, whether it was masculine or feminine. The results were never entirely surprising: powerful - masculine, loving - feminine, just - masc., compassionate - fem., strong - masc., etc. Eventually someone would sort of catch on and start replying "both". I would have them look at the board and tell me what this says about God. God is not male or female - God does not have a body. Then I would ask what it says about us. What does it mean to men that we say being loving and compassionate is feminine? What does it mean to women that we say being powerful, strong, and just is masculine? I recently heard that there is a new movement afoot called the "menaissance" (like Renaissance) encouraging men to be more manly and less "in touch with their feelings". Similarly much of the language about complementarity between the sexes has the danger of stereotyping men and women and limiting both groups in terms of what it means to be human. I recently heard a homily (not at St. Monica's) about husbands needing to love their wives, and wives needing to respect their husbands. Not once did the priest say that wives should also love their husbands, and husbands also need to respect their wives.

Many people are uncomfortable with feminist theology and feminine images of God, but as theologian Elizabeth Johnson points out, the symbol of God functions. The way we image God has an impact on the way we understand the human persons created in God's image. What does it say about all of the traits listed above when we exclusively image God as male? Not that it is wrong to image God as male, but it is also not wrong to use female metaphors for God, because all of our language about God is metaphor. Images help us relate to God, but they do not capture God. Johnson also points out that to use one image exclusively for God is actually idolatry.

So what does this have to do with Akiane's paintings? I invite you to hear her story and look at the images she has created, and I hope that they will inspire you as they do me. But I also offer them to you with the caveat to take them as real and true, for Akiane and maybe for you, but not literal. They are beautiful symbols and representations of an extraordinary relationship this little girl has with God that, as she herself points out, will always go beyond what we can capture with the limited means at our disposal in this life.