Robert Merrill

“Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true: We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape.”
― Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers

“It is as creatures made jointly in God’s image that women and men together have the task of mastering the earth. In Genesis 1 there is a structure of authority. God is the ultimate authority. God then delegates authority over creation to humanity, and women and men together are the means of exercising it. There is no suggestion in the creation stories that God designed the world to be a place where any human beings exercised authority over any others. There was no authority to be exercised by men over women, or husbands over wives;”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“It is said that the difference between God and us is that God never thinks he is us. Genesis suggests some nuancing of that insight. God doesn’t mind sharing with us the divine life and the divine image and thus the divine responsibility for the world, and eventually God will become one of us.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16

“God is a different league of person from us, but God is a person like us, not an abstract force or a principle. So despite the huge difference, Genesis says we are made in God’s image. Human beings are the kind of entity God would be if God were earthly. God could hardly have become a horse; horses were not made in God’s image. Human beings were made God-like, so it was not so unnatural for God to become a human being. It is this fact that makes it possible for God sometimes to appear in human form in the Old Testament, and it eventually makes possible, even makes natural, God’s incarnation in Christ. In this sense it was not logically difficult for God to become a human being although it involved some sacrifice.”
― John E. Goldingay, Genesis for Everyone: Part 1 Chapters 1-16