After last week’s reflection on how I bungled my TED talk, I thought it might be worth sharing what I had originally written…
What words come to mind when you think of God? In my work as a pastoral associate, this question comes up often and I’m always intrigued by the various answers people give:
God is loving. God is angry. God is merciful. God is judgmental.
The answers are all over the place, and it’s really important to know what your answer is to that question, because your image of God determines so much about who you think you are, and how you interact with the world around you. We spend so much time trying to understand God or determine the correct beliefs to have about God, but I would like to propose a challenge.
Instead of trying to whittle God down to our level of human comprehension, what if we instead launched ourselves into the great mystery that IS God? Instead of putting God in a box, and leaving out all the folks who don’t agree with what’s in that box, what if we threw our arms open to everyone we encountered, acknowledging that the same divine source that created me also created them, and therefore, we are all connected? Wouldn’t that be a game changer? So how do we do this? How do we go about launching ourselves into a bigger image of God? Well, you have to know what your CURRENT image actually is!
Hopefully, this image changes and grows throughout our lives. As a 51 year old married mother of two teenagers, I would certainly hope that my image of God now is deeper and more nuanced than the image I had in third grade!
I was born and raised Catholic, which meant we went to Mass every Sunday, took religious education classes so we could receive Communion and be confirmed, and prayed the Rosary whenever we took cover in the basement for tornado watches.
We did all the things we were supposed to do, although, especially as a child and adolescent, I’m not sure I always understood why. Checking all the requirements off the list sometimes made me feel like I was “done” with the God stuff here and now I could go over there to the other, more important, exciting, and relevant areas of my life.
At this stage, God was very remote and impersonal for me. God was more like Santa Claus—a white bearded man in the sky keeping track of when I was naughty and when I was nice! This experience made the next phase in my growing up with God that much more of a blessing that I will always be grateful for.
When I was in my late 20s, I took a job as a Christian Educator for a small Presbyterian Church, and the female minster there was instrumental in helping me grow a bigger perception of God by the example she lived out.
Reverend Nancy knew her parishioners by name, willingly gave out great big bear hugs, and loved to sing at the top of her lungs or bust a gut laughing. She went so far as to dress in full clown regalia the Sunday she preached about Paul’s proclamation that he was a “fool for Christ”. Complete with a purple frizzy wig and big, floppy shoes, Reverend Nancy showed me an image of God that was joyful and welcoming, and it’s an example I’ve tried to emulate every day since.
Nancy also introduced me to a concept of God that I had never even considered before, and that was the idea of God being vulnerable. When she was 51 years old (the same age I am now), Reverend Nancy was diagnosed with lung cancer and the side effects of chemotherapy brought her to her knees. I’ll never forget the Sunday that she had to pull up a stool in order to sit down and preach her sermon.
Again, quoting Paul, Nancy said that she finally understood what he meant when he said, “Christ’s power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, when I am weak, then I am strong.” Nancy died about two months after she delivered that sermon, and as far as I now, she never blamed God for what she went through. Nancy taught me that God doesn’t punish us and God doesn’t manipulate us. Rather, God suffers when we suffer and weeps when we weep, and we have got to let God off the hook and stop making God the fall guy for when bad things happen in our lives.
It’s interesting to me that the next phase in my growing up with God took me straight back into my head. I think that experience of God as a close companion was almost too intimate and too scary, so I chose to put God back at arms’ length and do some deciphering instead.
During this stage, I did a lot of reading, highlighting, and notetaking about what I believed and why. I was convinced that I had the 100% black and white truth about God and faith, and anyone who didn’t see it the same way I did wasn’t as “enlightened” as I was. I wasn’t nearly as interested in someone else’s experience of God as I was in how well their experience aligned with mine. I was arrogant enough to think that I had God all figured out.
What is it about our need to be right? Why is it so important to include some but for sure leave others out based on what they believe or don’t believe, when in reality, we are all one in Christ, Christ being the logos, the life source and energy that has existed since the beginning of time. The prologue to John’s gospel says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God….all things came to be through Him.” That’s our common denominator: all things came to be through Christ.
So how did I break free of that arrogant phase in my growing up with God? I had children, and there is nothing like having children to make you realize how little you actually know about ANYTHING. Becoming a mom cracked my heart open in a way I had never experienced before, and I knew without a doubt that no matter how my kids ever screwed up in life, nothing could change how much I love them, and I would forgive them anything, just as my own mom forgave me.
My mom repeatedly and unconditionally forgave me for all the times I hurt her: when I lied to her about where I was going and who I was with, when she busted me for smoking with my friends at age 12, when I skipped religious education classes so I could hang out at the video arcade instead, and most notably, when I tried to ditch her and spend time with my friends the night we returned from her own mother’s funeral. Three days after Christmas. Yay me, right? Gold star for being an awesome teenager!
Even then, when I apologized, Mom’s response was the same as it was always was. She said, “Kris, I don’t love what you DID, but I always love YOU.” Doesn’t every person on the planet need to hear that message? While the things that we do shouldn’t necessarily all be condoned, they also don’t make us bad people, and they also don’t make God love us any less. That’s why God is God and we aren’t. The love I feel for my kids, the love my parents feel for me, which is HUGE, is still just a glimmer compared to the love that God has for each and every one of us, and yet the majority of the human race is walking around this earth thinking that they aren’t good enough for God. And the reason they don’t think they’re good enough is because we spend all our time trying to whittle God down to small, manageable pieces that we can dole out accordingly, instead of launching ourselves into the reality that IS God, which is love, mercy, compassion and grace.
So, what image of God do you want to grow up with?
What image do you want your children or grandchildren to grow up with?
It’s a question worth answering.
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