Michelangelo’s famous depiction of God.
Our image of what or who ‘God’ is can so often be merely human projection, severely limiting our understanding of the Divine. This can prevent us from being open to experiencing Divine reality, and what it truly is, which in turn means we are unlikely to plumb the depths of our full humanity. For writer and author Clare Boyd-Macrae this question reached a crisis point when prayer began to feel ‘like a waste of time’:
I grew up with about three images of God, and I suspect many Christians are still in the same boat today.
When I was a kid, God was Father, with occasionally a Lord or King thrown in for good measure. That was about it, except for God as Judge, which didn’t help much. Surprise, surprise: we grew up with woefully inadequate pictures of God. Lords and Kings mean very little to contemporary people, and the few associations we have with the words are unlikely to be positive ones. As for father, I loved my mine dearly, and he loved me, but many people are not so fortunate. And, like many others of my generation, even the nicest fathers tended to be absent a lot of the time.
In Alice Walker’s wonderful book The Colour Purple one of the characters talks about getting the old white man (her image of God) out of her heart. I suspect many of us have to do the same.
In the Bible, there are dozens of images of God, including some blatantly female and maternal ones. There’s light and shepherd, vine and fire, dove and potter, lamb and servant, mother hen and breast feeding woman. There are many, many more. Some, like a vine or a shepherd, may not be particularly helpful to urban people in the 21st century. But they point to the richness of the picture of God in the Bible alone. We neglect this at our peril.
I rediscovered this for myself when I spent a weekend at a monastery, something I try to do once a year. It was a Cistercian monastery, and they offer spiritual counselling. I usually do my own thing at these places, attend their daily offices and wander around feeling peaceful, but this time I decided to force myself out of my comfort zone and ask for spiritual direction.
I did wonder what could be achieved in an hour, or maybe two, with a total stranger, but I thought I’d give it a go. When the monk, the spiritual director, asked me what I wanted, I said that I needed help because I was having trouble praying. For most of my life I have spent time alone in prayer on a regular basis. As an adult this has mainly taken the form of contemplative or meditative prayer. But I had been becoming relentlessly frustrated in my prayer times. My head had buzzed, I’d felt unhappy and the whole thing felt like a waste of time.
I explained this to the monk, who asked me some more about my background. We talked for an hour, and he kept coming back to my image of God. What was my image of God when I was a little girl, he wanted to know. What is my image of God now?
After we had spoken, I went for a long walk, which is often the way I process things. And it came to me, as I walked across paddocks to the upper reaches of the muddy Yarra River that borders their property. The reason I couldn’t pray was that my image of God had not changed since I was a small child and He (definitely a He) was a distant, largely absent and almost constantly disapproving figure. I have studied theology, thought about these issues, discussed them with others, even written poetry about a God who was bigger than we can ever imagine, but it hadn’t got through to my heart.
When I prayed, I had a visual image of a bloke, old, in a long black gown. All I heard him saying to me was ‘Gees you’re a crap prayer. How long have you been doing this? Twenty years? Thirty? And you still can’t get it right. Stop wasting my time.’
And I wondered why prayer didn’t seem to be working for me.
Realising this was a major breakthrough. These days, when I pray, I sense, more often than not, that God delights in our relationship and loves to spend time with me at the start of each of my days. I picture a figure (probably female) who has infinite love for every human being, even me. I picture Jesus, who was particularly tender with people who despaired of themselves. I picture the Holy Spirit as a soft breasted dove or a wild wind or fire, comforting and enlivening me.
I don’t always feel peaceful, and my head still buzzes. But it’s okay, and those 20 minutes each morning are my anchor and arrow for the day. I am energised by this encounter with the biggest love in the universe. Because although Jesus said that if you have faith you can move mountains, sometimes I wonder if he didn’t mean love. If you are loved and know it, it seems to me you can do anything. You can cope with just about anything.
See Clare’s blog at: http://www.clareboyd-macrae.com/
Her latest book, Off the Page, is available online:
https://www.mediacomeducation.org.au/shop/off-the-page/