The image of God through our ages

I went to church on Saturday with a friend and it was a different experience for me. I’m Catholic, and though I have sprinkled other religious services here and there in my life, I am a regular attendant at my church’s Sunday mass. The church that we went to, which I was already familiar with, has a huge congregation. In order to sustain this fellowship, they have a well oiled machine that deals with the children and youth including several rooms and programs. In the Catholic Church it is rare to have the children do a program or service than the rest of the church (Catholicism is big on family faith and community faith). This got me thinking about how I saw God as a child and how differently I see him now. It's true that children seem to have a natural openness to the existence of God. Yet as we grow older, our childlike understanding of God meets a lot of painful awareness.

Childhood images of God reflect a childhood faith. Fair enough; we all have to start somewhere. An adult faith, however, requires more adult images of God, that is, new mental pictures which can help adults better understand a God never fully captured in human language. Childhood images of God as judge and father can be complemented by other biblical images of God, such as those portraying God as potter and mother. Childhood images of God are not automatically upgraded to adult images. Childhood images of God may need to grow if we are to have a vibrant, adult faith. Often a childhood image combines something true (God is all-powerful) with a mistaken conclusion (God will never let anything bad happen to me). If we fail to see how our childhood images of God are incomplete, we risk stunting our growth toward an adult faith.

Most of us gravitate toward two or three images of God as long as they help us make sense of life around us, but those images are not necessarily the whole truth about God. For example, God is a loving creator who may not answer my selfish prayers (like winning the lottery), but God will certainly answer my prayers if it's more serious (like someone's life), or so I think. But what happens to that image of God when I pray for a very sick person who then dies?

Consider the analogy of outgrowing a pair of shoes. If I have a single image of God and this is decisively contradicted by a new and painful experience in my life (example: God will always protect me, but last week I was beaten and robbed), in a sense, it's like outgrowing our old favorite footwear. We are challenged to change our assessment of the shoes, even if they were our favorites. I can continue to wear the same shoes and complain that they do not fit (why is this good God punishing me?). Or, I can quit wearing shoes altogether (become an atheist or an agnostic). Perhaps I can find shoes that fit (find images which do justice to all of God's self-revelation and to all of life as I have experienced it).

A Christian who chooses the third option must reexamine the Scriptures and reconsider the lives of holy Christians to see if he or she has missed any key information. In fact, this third option is a commitment to continual growth regarding the person's images of God. Imagine that when you were five years old someone asked you to describe your parents. Perhaps you would have answered (or did!) that your mother was very loving (the world's best cook!), your father was very strong (more so than your friend's father) and that together your parents took very good care of you. Now imagine that at age 30 you were asked the same question. Would you simply repeat your earlier answers? Hardly. Although you might use many of the same words (strength, love, care), they would have a deeper meaning.

Which description of your parents would be the correct one: the one you gave at age five or at age 30? Is it possible that they are both correct and are simply reflections of your growing ability to appreciate your parents? It would be a mistake either to disregard the five-year-old's description of his or her parents or, on the other hand, to accept it as the last word. Important discoveries (positive and negative) await everyone willing to see the "whole picture" about another person. It is, of course, possible to remain frozen in our earliest impressions of our parents. As a result we may idealize them, never allowing them to become real people with their own difficulties and "shadows," or we may fail to see good qualities we didn't value properly when we were children. If we can act this way with our own parents, why should we be surprised to find that our childhood images of God are insufficient? Is God insulted that we did not understand everything correctly from childhood? Or does God regret, rather, that as adults we are content to rely exclusively on those childhood images?

We would do well therefore to seek deeper images of God which are in better harmony with our adult faith and experience. However, developing adult images of God can be challenging, enriching and scary. Shortly after John Henry Newman retired to Littlemore (near Oxford, England) to reconsider his position in the Church of England, he wrote, "In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."

Men and women become adults spiritually not with the simple passing of years but rather when they begin to recognize how much their images of God fall short of the reality and how much God stretches us to respect all men and women created in the divine image (Genesis 1:26-27). When we truly convert, we surrender our idols and accept life on God's terms. Only then can our images develop until we see God face-to-face, so to speak, at the eternal banquet.