In my last posting I wrote of the experience of God in times of darkness, when God seems absent and uninterested. An important aspect of this is the image of God we carry in our minds. The God we ‘comprehend’ will always be greater than anything we can possibly imagine.
However, having said that, we always move from the known to the unknown. The fact that we make God in our own image and likeness is relevant and normal as human processes go. It also has good biblical support in that according to Genesis we are created in God’s image and likeness. Karl Rahner [1] wrote ‘When God wills to be non-divine, the human person comes to be’. So to make God in our own image and likeness is an intimation of the nature and character of God.
The problem is that not only are we often reluctant to let go our always inadequate images of God, we limit our vision of humanity. Both require that we step into Mystery but it is easier to live with containable labels. So we cling to what we know and can name like comfortable old shoes. Our understanding of being human is too small therefore our God will always be too small. For the hints as to who God is, let’s look to the sages and saints of human history as well as those life-giving people who enter our lives.
While our images of God will always be profoundly inadequate precisely because God is not just another entity in creation that we can analyse, God is continually beckoning, inviting, showing forth the Mystery in creation and particularly in us humans, and in Jesus in order that we may become like God. ‘The God who in and through Jesus reveals himself is human. And the human being who emerges in and through Jesus is divine’[2].
The parables and stories Jesus tells in the Gospels are alive with human stories - Would a father give his child a stone when he asks for bread? The woman who turns the house upside down to look for the lost coin. Above all, the ease with which Jesus dispenses forgiveness - even from the cross - is disconcerting for us. He scatters it around abundantly. The trouble is, I think that sometimes it is all too good to be true and it is too easy to dismiss Jesus’ actions as ‘different’ from our own.
We need to be attentive, to learn, to wait, to allow ourselves to be slowly transformed by our contemplation of this Mystery and this contemplation is not detached observance, it is the contemplation of love. It is the gaze of lovers, of an adult upon a beloved child - it is a look to tenderness, love, wonder and awe.
So, when we go through times of spiritual darkness and there is a deep sense of the absence of God, perhaps it is because our understanding of God is too small. The events of our lives have taken us to a point where we need to surrender into relationship with the God we think we know in order to enter into a new relationship with the God who beckons us further into the Mystery. Thus we become profoundly human and thereby divinised. It is conversion. We will and should strive to understand, but ultimately it is a journey of faith and surrender in faith, love and trust into the God of Jesus.
This surrender of faith, love and trust takes time. The human mind and spirit needs time to grow into something new. Even if there is a moment of profound insight, that moment still needs time and nurture in order to transform us, our relationship with God and our relationship with the world. So, we may have to wait in the darkness for a time.
In this darkness our relationship with God becomes more truthful. In this time we will struggle and at times rant at the God who seems hidden. There is nothing wrong with this. The psalms are full of it and after all, don’t we struggle from time to time with all our relationships because dethroning our isolated egos is one of the most difficult things we do in life until our being-in-relationships grows stronger and stronger.
So, as we wait in the darkness of prayer, we are, in the process being created anew to be more human - humanly divine and divinely human. The darkness is luminous.
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