Apostleship of Prayer Spirituality IMAGES OF GOD

When we meet a person that we have not seen for a while, we shall most likely make the remark: “You have changed.” The person is still the same person but the image that we had of that person has to change, to develop. Depending on how long a time it is since we last saw that person, will be the change that is being noticed. In fact the change may be so great that we do not even recognize the person we are meeting. So often the ways of viewing a person determines how we see that person. The same we can say about God. As our experience of life has developed over the years, as our ways of looking at the things around us has expanded, so will our ways of viewing God needs also to grow. Nevertheless the image of God that most of us have has not grown since we first met Him when we were children. The image of God is so often the one that began its existence when we children being taken to Mass by our parents.  Thus we have the problem that the God of our juvenility does not seem to be able to answer the problems that we are experiencing as an adult. Therefore we may be defending or attacking an image of God that does not seem to be relevant to the time in which we are living.

Again when we experience people, if we see them in only one way, then we may fall out of friendship with them as they no longer seem to be the same as the image of them when we first met them. Thus friends part, marriages break up, just for the simple reason that we do not allow the person to grow and to reveal more of themselves. If this is with the people we know and have known over the years so it is with God whom we only know through the images that we form of God. Hence it may be that, when a person says that they do not love God, it may well be that they do not know the real God. Just as one image of a human person is not adequate to reveal that person so we should also bear in mind that no one image for God is adequate for delving the depths of the Reality to whom we give the name God.   We have always to remember that all the images that we have for God are limited and inadequate, so that it is good to have more than one even if they appear to contradict each other.   An analogy that we could make is from the world of science: scientific progress often depends on having contradictory models for nature, e.g. the wave theory and the particle theory of matter.
 
 

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