"God," by Langston Hughes

I am God —
Without one friend,
Alone in my purity
World without end.

Below me young lovers
Tread the sweet ground —
But I am God —
I cannot come down.

Spring!
Life is love!
Love is life only!
Better to be human
Than God — and lonely.

+ Langston Hughes

One of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes deeply appreciated the role of joyous, ecstatic worship in African American life — and at the same time, he was often a blistering critic of how religion, and Christianity in particular, could be bought and sold to the highest bidder, or twisted into dull, dangerous, dehumanizing ideas.

In this poem, like an ancient prophet Hughes rails against the all-too-common religious portrait of God (including and especially among Christians!) as a kind of pure, distant monarch or judge, imperious and alone. For Christians today, reading the poem can be a helpful reminder, a warning to keep on guard against the ways this “distant judge” idea continually creeps into our theological imaginations. With this warning in mind, we can intentionally picture God — in our prayers and praise and reflection — not as remote and alone, locked away in divine purity, but rather the opposite: Immanuel, “God with Us,” a God who has indeed “come down” in Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and continues to do so, and whose resurrection resonates with the vibrant ecstasies of April.

Indeed, from this angle, we can catch sight of an important reason why the Christian tradition is so full of these ideas (Immanuel, “God is love,” the closeness of the Communion meal, the everyday intimacy of the Torah’s instruction, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and on and on). It’s precisely to resist and dismantle the all-too-common misconception this poem warns us against: the notion that God is distant, remote, and alone. The Gospel rises up against this idea, joyfully insisting on the contrary. “Life is love! / Love is life only!” The God who made us is not an indifferent, isolated, faraway sovereign, but rather is as close as our own breath, and so deeply, thoroughly loving as to be — Love itself!

So take this poem as a prophetic reminder, a spiritual practice to help keep us alive to the idea that God isn’t “away up there” but rather is always “right down here”; never “alone” but rather always in profound relationship with us and with creation as a whole; as intimate and ordinary as “the sweet ground,” our everyday connections with each other, and the commonplace, astonishing arrival of spring.