Texts:
"Holy Holy Holy, the LORD God Almighty, who was and is and is to come."
I think this text points to the impossibility of confining God to our expectations. Sometimes, our not being able to confine God to our small imaginations inspires our doubt or our fear. I think our implicit assumption is that God behaves rather like an omniscient teenager would: dark and brooding when things are going poorly and happy and exuberant when things are going well. We inconstant humans superimpose upon God our inconsistencies.
I wonder how it is that we are able to see God working in our lives when things are going well but believe ourselves to be alone when everything seems to be crashing around us. I wonder how it is the theodicy problem (the problem of the existence of evil) ever became a problem at all. It smacks of Modernity to me: the modern man [the non-gender inclusive term is intentional] had trouble conceiving of anything outside himself if it could not be seen. The problem of evil became a problem "out there" and, for many, the dwelling of the Divine also existed somewhere "out there", both relegated to the outer realms of existence. Theologians struggled to speak the language of the culture, only to find that they too had moved both evil and God into the same realm of existence in a way that neither could be reconciled with the other and - more sadly - struggled to find a way to allow the two to coexist. Evil and God became intellectual problems (yes: problems) which needed a solution (because there cannot be a problem without a solution). Whereas humanity lived through the dark ages somehow holding the complexities in tension without knowing they were doing so, Modernity sought to relieve humanity of these tensions. Rather than being seen as how the world is held together, seemingly disparate entities were put to war with one another, with man being the mastermind of the Game, the god of his own making, casting God in his image but casting Evil in the image of Another.
If we do not gasp in awe and in wonder at the Maker of the Universe, if we do not stand in tearful joy at the Reconciler of the Universe, if we do not find our breath taken away as the Spirit of Sustenance blows past our lives, our God is too small to be worth our allegiance and truly, we have traded who God is for who we can conceive God to be. If you can conceive of God and understand God and imagine yourself clinging to God, your God is too small. If you stand in awe, wondering at what this Love must be, that holds the whole universe and you in its arms, binding itself to you, this is nothing other than God, drawing near.
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