Like every other kid in my neighborhood, I knew what God looked like when I was a child. He was a somewhat rotund white male with an engaging smile and a long white beard that complimented the white robe draped over his shoulders. He was somewhere up in the sky, outside my range of vision, and his chief occupation was to keep a score card of my sins and everyone else’s. It seemed then, and does now, that the construction of an eternal cosmic indiscretion inventory is probably more than a full time occupation, even for God.

I left childhood behind more decades ago than I care to remember, and since that time I haven’t spent much time contemplating the Almighty. It just hasn’t been a major preoccupation of mine although I must confess that with increasing age, the fact that more of my friends and family seem headed for the eternal care unit serves as constant reminder of the fragility of life. Most of the time I take life, and God, for granted.

But some months ago, a Nicholas Kristof Op-Ed piece in The New York Times caught my attention when I read, "As Spinoza noted, ‘If a triangle could speak, it would say…that God is eminently triangular.’" That statement intrigued me.

Now, I’d like to pretend that Spinoza is a household name in our family, but the truth is that it’s a name that I was only vaguely familiar with. So, I looked him up in the encyclopedia and it turns out he was a fifteenth century Jewish Dutch philosopher whose parents were part of a group of Jews who were forced to accept Christianity, but secretly remained Jewish.

By extension of Spinoza’s logic, I would have to say that if a box could speak, God would be eminently square or rectangular, and if a tire could speak God would be eminently round. Well, guess what? I can speak and God looks amazingly like me.

I became vaguely aware of that fact when, as a student at Muhlenberg College, Dr. Swain, my World History prof, commented to the class that, "God created man in his own image and man has returned the compliment ever since." At the time, I thought that was a clever statement, but the truth of it has remained with me all these decades.

As a student, my God was one that I’d created, one that I could easily conceptualize and understand. I bought completely into the comfort of the old gospel hymn that I’d learned as a child—He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I am His own. It took many years before I recognized that, comforting as it might be, this characterization of the deity diminished God into something equivalent to Linnus’ blankey in the Snoopy comic strip.

I wanted my God to be the rabbit’s foot or the good luck charm who would help my football team win, or my horse win the Preakness, or my army defeat the enemy. We were buddies and God would help me to achieve my goals—an A in Biology, a scholarship to medical school. As I recognized that this God was simply an extension of my own desires, the God of my creation seemed less and less pertinent to my life.

But several years ago I read Thomas Cahill’s book, The Gift of the Jews, where he points out that as the nomadic Hebrew tribes moved from polytheism toward monotheism hundreds of years before the time of Christ, the God they worshiped was The God Who is Beyond Our Understanding.

Now that’s a God I can buy into. I know that what I understand is infinitesimally small in the totality of knowledge. And beyond what I know are the vast unknowns which I only vaguely know I don’t know. I can certainly acknowledge a God Who is Beyond Our Understanding.

A major focus of most organized religions, however, since the advent of monotheism seems to have been the continuing effort to make God understandable—to reduce him/her/it to humanly manageable proportions. The end result is a multitude of religionists who proudly proclaim an inside knowledge of who God is, of what he/she/it wants, and what I must do to get on God’s good side. In centuries past these religionists have declared with equal fervor that the world is flat, that slavery is ordained of God, that God sees women as having lesser value than men and now, that gays and lesbians are less worthy creatures than the self-appointed preachers and prophets who have a direct pipeline to the ear of the deity.

To avoid playing a religious version of Follow the Leader, it seems to me that it’s time for a re-evaluation. It’s time to return to Spinoza and recognize that God is triangular—at least from the stand point of a triangle. And so, ala Spinoza, I want to redefine god.

Number one, God is genderless, neither he, nor she, nor it. God is God.

Secondly, God is not white, like I am, but neither is God colorless. God is multi-hued with all the colors of the rainbow, the symbol we gays and lesbians claim with pride.

And as to size? Well every gay male knows that size does matter, and my redefined god is BIG. I mean really BIG—bigger than my understanding, bigger than my imagination and beyond my ability to cast in my own image. And perhaps, most importantly, my God has the greatest sense of humor in the entire galaxy. How else could the behavior and arrogance of the created be tolerated by the Creator?

Summer thunder, I was told as a child, was God bowling in the heavenly bowling alley. Now I know better. The crescendos of thunder that cascade across Delmarva as part of the summer storms are really the belly laugh of the Creator viewing the arrogance and ignorance of the created, who, after all these eons of time, still tries to craft a definition of God.