Changes in our Relationship with God

Rebecca Ann Parker, telling of her struggle to vanquish the ghosts of a deep childhood trauma haunting a living, warm and loving relationship in Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us (with Rita Nakashima Brock; Beacon Press; 2001, $18.00) writes, “I tried prayer, but God seemed powerless to free me. One night, responding to my anguish, David said, “Try praying. I’ll pray with you if you want.” “No,” I said. “God is not any help. I’ve asked.” David said, “Your God is not helping you with this?” “No,” I said, angry and frustrated. “Well, then,” David said, “this is California. Get another God.” (p195)

This moment of humor injected into her painful bondage – bondage to her past and bondage to an image of God – provided a surgical clip loosening her shroud. Much as we are all fond of our images of God, periodically we get so caught up in them that a moment of grace is required to shed the scales from our eyes and remind us that our images are just that – products of our imagination attempting to grasp the unfathomable. The Bible provides us with manifold images of God as it records the attempts of a people of faith through the centuries imaging God in a different way after once again finding themselves in bondage.

For each of us, I think, there is a personal central issue around which we struggle to grasp the form and presence of God like Jacob at the Jabbok Ford. We are rather like oysters, and God the grain of sand which we coat and coat and coat again with lacquer, but which we never get rid of nor (hopefully) with which we ever get really comfortable. For some, like Rebecca Ann Parker, the issue is a deeply painful personal experience. For others like myself, it may be more abstract – what kind of God creates and allows such unjust division of the benefits of this world with me being on the excessively benefited end of the deal. We leave each struggle freed again, build an altar, and limp off into the world made new by another act of imaginative divine love.

Proverbs of Ashes is a deeply personal, probing, and at times disturbing recounting of Brock’s and Parker’s struggle to fashion an image of God for themselves out of the violence of their lives. Another woman tells her story in Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life by Roberta Bondi (Abingdon, 1995, $19.00). Bondi is one of my wife Susan’s favorite authors and she is high on my list too. If you read only one book of hers, this would be my pick, for she is able to tell flowing stories laced with wise insight about the binding that our understanding of God and faith can put on our souls. In a reflection particularly on point, Bondi writes about discovering in early church writings that “Sin [is] about being blinded and wounded by our own and society’s patterns of seeing, feeling, and acting so that we [can] not love one another or God.” (p135)

Francis S. Collins is a geneticist of high standing and long time head of the Human Genome project. He is also a man of strong religious conviction and has written The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, 2006, $15.00). In the first chapter he tells the story of his first real struggle with God, changing from atheist to Christian, as a result of encounters with people of faith and with C.S. Lewis’s writing, especially Mere Christianity. Intellectually he was convinced by the “Moral Law” that Lewis describes as fundamental to human existence. The editors attached the unfortunate subtitle to the book, for that is really his sole evidence for belief and the remainder of the book is really about the current state of Collins struggle with an image of God that correlates with the science he understands. He ably shows that vigorous theology and rigorous science are not strange bedfellows.

A compilation of shorter essays on images of God is found in The Changing Face of God edited by Frederick W. Schmidt (Morehouse, 2000, $12.95). Contributors include Karen Armstrong, Marcus Borg, James Cone, Jack Miles, and Andrew Sung Park. The book is designed for use as a study, but the articles stand on their own merits with or without a group discussion. To sum up, from Schmidt’s first chapter, “...our pictures of God are and should be forever provisional, shifting to meet both narrower and larger needs, grasping more of the nature of God on some level, while at the same time acknowledging that they are less than can ever be known.” (p9)

David Davies is co-owner of Soul Desires bookstore in Omaha NE with his wife, the Rev. Susan Davies.