I was never taught that if I were to enter a personal relationship with God, that I would be perpetually stretched to rediscover God again and again, or that my experience of God would keep expanding and breaking every mould I knew that could help me understand who “God” is. But that has been my experience of being in relationship with God. I confess it is very discomfiting and disturbing when long and firmly held convictions about God that seemed cast in stone are shattered by the very same God I am trying to know more deeply and love more faithfully.
I used to think that the “goal post” was fixed. That God or at least the understanding of who God is – is somewhat fixed. And that what I needed to do was grow in my understanding of that rather ‘fixed’ knowledge so that I could understand what being faithful looked like. I came to know God in and through the Roman Catholic tradition – a beautiful and rich tradition, but also one in which there is much authoritative certitude about what is true as well as how we should understand God.
It is very discomfiting and disturbing when long and firmly held convictions about God that seemed cast in stone are shattered by the very same God I am trying to know more deeply and love more faithfully.
Yet the more I sought to know Christ, the more the “goal post” seemed to be moved further back. Again and again God surprised me by revealing a new dimension of himself that my learned religious vocabulary and imagery struggled to contain. In fact every now and then I had to let go of the language I have learned and the intellectual containers I have previously used to understand God in order to keep up with the new ways that Love was revealing itself to me.
Indeed, why should I be surprised at all? Logically, even at a much earlier stage of my interior journey, I understood that God must transcend every human attempt to explain or understand God. I understood cognitively that God must transcend even the Roman Catholic or Christian tradition because surely, God could not be contained by any tradition or even religion. And yet, I had always felt that it was necessary to confine my encounters with God within what I understood my religious tradition has conclusively and authoritatively taught about him. That made me feel secure to know that I was safe within what was considered to be “right belief”, and that was my earlier understanding of what it meant to be faithful.
Every now and then I had to let go of the language I have learned and the intellectual containers I have previously used to understand God in order to keep up with the new ways that Love was revealing itself to me.
But God kept getting bigger for me. As my distorted images of God became more healed, I realised God is so different from who I thought he was. Over time I realised that so much of how God has been described and taught through the ages have contributed to traumatic, narrow and distorted images of God because they have come through wounded human beings and wounded institutions and wounded cultures. I found that even so much of what is taught as “authoritative” is imperfect, distorted and still in need of healing and evolution! This does not negate the role of organised religion or the necessity of the Church, but it does open up the question – at least for me – dare I believe that God and the Church are not one and the same, and that a living, growing relationship with God will transform the way I see, understand and relate with Church (and indeed the world)?
For many years now I have been asking for the grace to find a new way of “being Catholic” – a way that allows me to integrate what God has been doing in me, and the new dimensions of how God reveals himself and the world to me – with what it means to be a Catholic Christian. I don’t believe anyone who has not had to go on a similar interior journey can possibly understand how painful, frightening and lonely this process is. Even I never knew until I was faced with the command to offer up my Catholic identity on the altar the way Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac just how much of my identity was built on a very particular understanding of being Roman Catholic. To be asked to give that up was an invitation to die to what has given me the most reliable sense of security and identity in my entire life (because I did not have that kind of security and stability from my family of origin or from any other relationship).
Dare I believe that God and the Church are not one and the same, and that a living, growing relationship with God will transform the way I see, understand and relate with Church (and indeed the world)?
God kept getting bigger because LOVE kept getting bigger in my life. The vastness of Love, the transformative and healing presence of Love, seems to have no bounds or limits. I have never been more confident that God IS LOVE, or more humbled that I truly do not yet know how to love as God does. But I am more sure now than I have ever been in my life that I am loved even when I cannot feel it – there is a deep knowing now in my “bones” that goes beyond my intellect’s ability to grasp it, or even my emotions’ ability to feel it. And I am also surer now than I have ever been in my life that God’s love is poured out without bounds not only for every human being regardless of “worthiness” but also for every particle that is in the whole of Creation – not only here on earth but throughout the Cosmos. God’s love truly encompasses and includes ALL.
God is not only my God, nor my religion’s God, nor is he just humanity’s God. My religious and spiritual vocabulary has not yet caught up with this growing expansiveness of my experience of God and the tension gives me great discomfort. But I am not anxious. And I am now ready to accept this discomfort as part of my spiritual and emotional maturation process. I am willing to go wherever Christ may lead me on this interior journey and I know God will continue to sustain me and provide for me as he has always done.
I am also surer now than I have ever been in my life that God’s love is poured out without bounds not only for every human being regardless of “worthiness” but also for every particle that is in the whole of Creation – not only here on earth but throughout the Cosmos.
I shall close this sharing with a version of the The Lord’s Prayer that I recently came across at a retreat. It resonated so deeply with me because in many ways this language is closer to expressing God as I have come to know God in my life. I hope it may bless you too.
Eternal Spirit,
Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven.
The hallowing of your name echoes through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom
Sustain our hope and come on earth.
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and testing, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love
Now and forever.
Amen.
From the New Zealand Prayer Book
Journey of the Heart 