When I entered the monastery in 1964 at age 17, my
image and experiences of God were unformed. As a child I remember wondering how
God could possibly keep track of the good things and the bad things I did, the
prayers and activities for which I received indulgences and the graces that I
received,, much less those of everyone else. It seemed to me to be a lot of
math.
One
of the first writers I encountered in the monastery was George Bernard Shaw. In
the novitiate library there was a book on Shaw’s relationship and
correspondence with Dame Laurentia McLachlan, a Benedictine nun. I found it
more interesting than the other theological or devotional works. Somewhere Shaw
said (as this is a paraphrase) “God made humanity in his image and likeness and
humanity has been doing the same thing to God ever since.”This quote stirred me
to think about how I viewed God and who God really was.
Later
I encountered the book, That Man is You by Louis Evely, a Catholic spiritual
writer from Belgium. The book, printed in 1964, made a great impact on my
spiritual life because Evely wrote about the Gospel in a readable down to earth
style. In the book he tells the following story:
In one of his plays, Jean Anouilh describes the last judgment as he sees it.
The good are densely clustered at the gate of
Heaven, eager to march in, sure of their reserved seats,keyed up and bursting with impatience.
All at once, a rumor starts spreading: “It seems he’s going to forgive those others
too!” For a minute, everyone’s dumbfounded. They look at one another in disbelief, gasping and sputtering,
“After all the trouble I went through!” “If only I’d known this…” “I just can’t get over it.!"
Exasperated, they work themselves into a fury and start cursing God; and at that very instant they’re damned. That was the final judgment, you see. They judged themselves, excommunicated themselves.
Love appeared, and they refused to acknowledge it.
“We don’t know this man.” “We don’t approve of a heaven that’s open to every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”
“We spurn this God who lets everyone off.”\\
“We can’t love a God who loves so foolishly.”
And because they didn’t love Love, they didn’t recognize Him by the way He loves.
I
have never forgotten that story. I think it was the first time I really
understood the Scripture: “God is love.” Instead of imaging God as a
theological bookkeeper or severe judge, I began to see that God is not limited
by our finite images and notions of who God is. God is totally free and loving.
The
next quotation that has developed my image of God is similar to the two above.
It appears in the book Your Word is Near: Contemporary Christian Prayers by
Huub Oosterhuis (1968). In a litany of names and images of God, Oosterhuis
calls God:
You
not God as we think you;
Furnace
of silence, difficult friend.
My
current image and experience of God have been shaped by years of reflection on
these three pivotal quotations. And that reflection has brought me to my own
quotation: “God is more than our finite human imaginations can image. And God
is infinitely better than the best of us. '
Sr. Deborah Harmeling, OSB
I am reading a book by M. Basil Pennington entitled The True Self/The False Self. The book has very good insights into our true self being our identity in God, being made in God's image and likeness. For most of us this discovery takes a life time and is aided by prayer and contemplation.
