What is your image of God?  Michael Angelo painted a figure on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that is supposed to be his representation of God. There is a lot of debate and rumors around where he got the model for this image of God.  But it has been five hundred years since this cathedral was painted. It was painted during the Renaissance.  The image was of a muscular, white man with a long, greyish white beard and flowing white hair.  Some artists say that this was because flowing beards and flowing hair at that time implied wisdom.  But for five centuries we have been taught to imagine God looking just like the God-image in the Sistine Chapel, a big, white man with white hair and a white, flowing beard.  For many this image is what they think of when they are praying.  He is very angry at times.  Even wrathful. Certainly not a God that is made up of only love, but a being that lives in the sky and dictates punitive justice. Even if he has a different appearance, he is always a he.  And some people think that if you don’t believe God is this image, you are a nonbeliever. 

If it helps you to imagine God in this way, I am not knocking it.  That is your relationship.  But as time marches on, people have stopped believing God is a being in the heavens that sees everything and makes everything happen.  For many, that image is too old and too narrow to represent God.  That includes things that have to do with religion. Elizabeth A. Johnson says that the path to God always winds through our historical circumstances of time and place which makes each belief its own, like no other.   But for most people the man in the heavens is from a by-gone era. She quotes Karl Rahner when she writes “not all who live at the same time are contemporaries.” The more agnostic of this era– “I don’t understand God” — may be a path to actually getting in touch with that of God within, which can be nourishing and warming during what can feel like the winter of religious experiences.  God is a mystery, unfathomable – not to be completely understood, definitely not by one person or even groups of people. Karl Rahner writes

Since our mind is not proportionate to the divine substance, God remains beyond our intellect and so is unknown to us.  Hence the supreme knowledge which we have of God is to know that we do not know God, insofar as we know that what God surpasses all that we can understand.

Who are we to know the incomprehensible creator of all good?  The great mystery?

We are blessed because this force can walk with us through all of our trials, all of life’s circumstances, helping us to make better decisions, to become better instead of bitter, to overcome and seek peace. But beware that we do not judge others.  They may have heard their truth and are trying  in their very best way to implement what they have comprehended from this incomprehensible mystery.

This mystery is so large that it stretches us to hold more compassion, to be filled with more grace for ourselves and for others.

God is inexplicable so cannot be pushed into a creed or dogma, and certainly not with naïve and superficial words. 

Elizabeth A. Johnson writes, “Mystery here is not meant in the spooky sense. Nor does it have the mundane meaning of a puzzle that has yet to be solved, as in a literary murder mystery. Rather, mystery signifies the idea that the Holy is so radically different from the world, so wholly other, that human beings can never form an adequate idea nor arrive at a total possession.”

 It takes two or three seeking this radical unfathomable dynamic connection to this amorphous Divine to have the experience of joint worship.  But what does that word even mean, “worship?”   Are we opening ourselves in worship to this force that created nature?  As we sit in silence and hear what we think  is nothing, it may be truths of centuries coming to us on a different frequency and different wave lengths that gives our human ears no understanding, but our heart tries to grapple with what it is sensing.  We listen to the silence and pray to be opened up and poured out, to be used and useful for this mighty power.  Is that worship?

I’ve told you the story of the woman at my last church who said that she didn’t believe in prayer but then said that she had been missing church recently because her meditation and yoga classes were held on Sunday mornings.  To me prayer is any way we try to connect to that spiritual realm that is always open to us, always waiting for us to pay attention. We are in our own ways trying to relate to this incomprehensible force and maybe tap into it to become recharged with good, with love, with understanding, with compassion, and healing.

These words – God, worship and pray —  are all up to the individual to articulate meaning.  But it helps when we are on the same page.  To me, God is an energy that is generous, gracious, merciful, loving, kind — all things good come from God and are of that energy.  At the core, so are we. Hand a baby a pacifier and it will try many times to put it in your mouth and share.  We are wired to stop and help people who are in danger, to smile back at the person who smiles at us, to not ignore anyone in need. We can be taught or reprogrammed to be apathetic, but we are born empathetic and become apathetic as time and circumstances change us. We are born wired to seek the truth, to want it, to need to make things fair for others and ourselves. We look to God to help us get to truth and get to justice, but the more we worship, or unite with this energy, the more we want to seek truth and to seek justice.  God is also the source of all knowledge, and we as humans are curious and want to know things.  We want to understand things, but when we don’t, we can be insatiable.  There will never be enough truth for the truth-seekers, enough justice for those who seek fairness, and there will never be enough knowledge for the seekers of wisdom either.  In us is a source of hunger that drives us toward that of God in all things and the love in our hearts.  This is the good love — not a warm fuzzy kind of love – but a steadfast and true form of love that spreads us past our own lives and into the lives of others, empowering both simultaneously, and helping us transcend whatever lays before us. 

God is not about a stereotype in the clouds, but where rubber meets the road, inspiration, imagination and implementation of a better world.  This nature can be corrupted, misled, and warped to fit the beliefs of others.  But the human spirit in its pure form was made to be transcendental with a natural hunger for love, truth, goodness, and fairness.  We are made to problem solve and overcome.  There is a fierce will within that empowers us to be resilient.

God is dynamic, and we are created in such a way that we can plan and speculate, project and implement so that that dynamic power can flow through you and me and be a prevailing force in this world.  We have the capacity to care deeply and to feel intensely and the will to do whatever we put our minds to.  Imagine if all of us relied on that internal energy of light to do good with our lives everyday how spectacularly we could impact this world!

We can choose to be part of the dynamic through faith and through love and through love.

Queries:

• What do you see when you imagine God?
• Can you develop a relationship with energy and how?