Think back to your earliest image of God, to the way you looked at and thought about God when you were a little kid. Think back to it; when you’re a little kid, the world looks different. Everything seems new and wonderful and mysterious. Walking down to the end of your street is by itself an adventure, filled with discovery of new trees, bushes, plants, people, houses containing new secretes, mysteries and stories. As a little kid, you’re Frodo Baggins and your very neighborhood is Middle Earth.
When I was a little kid, I had that sense of the mysterious. I knew the world held secrets that I didn’t fully understand. I knew there were things that my mind couldn’t rationalize or break into bite size pieces. Trees would continue to tower over me no matter how much I thought about why they were so tall. The ceiling light in the room would continue to go on when I hit the switch, even if I couldn’t fully grasp why. Buildings were built, trains ran, people bustled about and I could grasp none of it. No, I accepted (in part because I had to) that the world was a wondrous, mysterious place, which made it a perfect place for adventure. God was a central part of that.
If I had to give a name to it, I think I would say that my image of God at the time was the God of miracles. I firmly believed God was watching over me at every moment. I believed He heard me when I prayed and I trusted fully that He’d respond. I believed in angels and I talked a lot with my guardian angel who was always a comfort to have around. My Aunt Jen’s stories about the rosary and the scapular fascinated me; stories about Mary appearing to the three children at
Then I started at the local public school and it seemed like everyone was trying to demystify this world around me. “No, you can’t make a rainbow by planting gold in the ground.” “No, you can’t fly just by flapping your arms like a bird.” “No, even with super shoes with springs on the bottom, you can’t jump to Heaven to talk with the saints and the Holy Souls.” The first two admonitions were good advice. I did indeed try to plant fools gold thinking that a rainbow would pop out of the ground and it was good information to know that rainbows are the result of the sun passing through water droplets in the air. And it’s true that I practiced for hours flapping my arms trying to fly. It was good for me to know that physics were working against me and it wasn’t from lack of practice that I never took off. But the third point wasn't so helpful…You see, some of the people in my school thought that just because they could rationalize some pieces of the world, they could rationalize it all. They had never seen Heaven, so they figured there was no way to get there. No matter how powerful my super shoes, they wouldn't help me. That chasm between Heaven and earth could not be bridged.
It was right around then that I began to have what some people would call a distant image of God. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a sense in which there is a great distance between God and us. God is infinitely more wise, powerful and loving than we could ever be. His home is in Heaven, a place of joy that we can only imagine. But I lost track of God’s all loving, all powerful nature and began to think that He stayed in Heaven, never directly affecting the things here on earth. All the things I believed as a little kid that brought me such a sense of joy and adventure I now excused as mere childish superstition. Just as I had once believed that planting gold in the ground will produce a rainbow and learnt otherwise, so too I had once believed Christ might appear to me or speak at any moment and now I learnt otherwise. Miracles weren’t the way of the world. The world worked according to fixed laws, constant patterns, clear, brutal logic that human beings in their infinite capacity for reason had been able to pick apart and understand. I began to think that when adults talked of miracles, they were really talking symbolically not literally. They didn’t really mean that bread turned in to Jesus’ body; that was just a symbol of Christ’s presence in the community. All those stories about Mary appearing to people? They were just legends picked up by pious old ladies. And prayer? People addressed God in prayer but often they were talking to each other, not God. Prayer was just a way of people sharing each others burdens. In the end, the mysteries I saw as a little kid were all the results of ignorance.
I still believed in God, but it was a different God than the God of my early childhood. This God was not so familiar and not so close. He created the world or at least set the Big Bang in motion. He even heard prayers from His distant heavenly abode although He often chose not to answer them directly. Ultimately God was the gatekeeper of that place of life after death, but He was only of indirect concern to the living. I felt so proud of myself. I was smart, I had reasoned my way through the messiness of the world, I had let go of all those childish beliefs, I was mature!
I was wrong.
Right up until middle school, I took it for granted that my rationalistic way of thinking was just the mature, adult way of looking at the world. It never occurred to me that smart, intelligent people might think otherwise. They did. At first I noticed it gradually in some conversations I had with my grandfather (whom I respect immensely.) I realized he actually believed the devil was a real being. Then I noticed it in the way my Aunt Jen spoke of Jesus; when she said Jesus spoke to her, she didn’t mean in some sort of metaphorical way. She meant Jesus spoke to her. But they were old and maybe just stuck in their ways. But then I heard Fr. Ted preach a sermon on the Eucharist. All the time I’d been receiving Holy Communion, I thought I was receiving bread symbolic of Christ and every sermon I’d heard left me that wiggle room. Fr. Ted didn’t and this shook out of my rationalistic mindset. For the first time, I looked over at the tabernacle with the eyes of faith and I saw Him. Jesus Himself was in that tabernacle, body, blood, soul and divinity, standing right in front of me. I felt this deep joy hit me in the deepest recesses of my soul, I felt washed by this amazing divine love that I’d been missing before. The God I knew in my early childhood was right there all along, I had simply closed my eyes to Him.
For years I had believed what the rationalists told me about the world I lived: I believed them when they told me there was no mystery or wonder to it, that we had unlocked all of its secrets and that the only secrets left were about the life hereafter if it existed at all. But they were wrong. God wasn’t distant, He was here. Something wonderful and mysterious was standing right in front of me in the Blessed Sacrament and His name was Jesus. Certainly not all the beliefs of my childhood were right, since no matter how much I flap arms, I still haven’t managed to fly. But I was right to open my eyes to the mystery, because God is wonderful, He is mysterious, He is as near as my guardian angel, and He loves me deeply.
When I started this post, I asked you to think back to your earliest image of God. But now I challenge you to go deeper. Walk into any Catholic Church, down the aisle whether on or to the left or right of the altar in a little gold box, you will find Jesus in the flesh. Go, speak to Him, open your eyes to Him like when you were a child. You won’t need to ask, “How do I imagine God?” He’s standing there in front of you, just look and see. He’s not distant, He’s not an abstract concept, He is there. Go meet Him.
No comments:
Post a Comment