God, life are mysteries; marvel at both

The following modern parable a reader sent me speaks about the continuity of human life.

In a mother’s womb were two babies. The first baby asked the other, “Do you believe in life after delivery?” The second baby replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What would that life be?”

“I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths.”

The doubting baby laughed. “This is absurd! Walking is impossible, and eating with our mouths? Ridiculous. The umbilical cord supplies nutrition. Life after delivery is to be excluded. The umbilical cord is too short.”

The second baby held his ground. “I think there is something and maybe it is different from it is here.”

The first baby replied, “No one has ever come back from there. Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery it is nothing but darkness and anxiety and it takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the twin, “but certainly we will see mother and she will take care of us.”

“Mother?” The first baby guffawed. “You believe in mother? Where is she now?”

The second baby calmly and patiently tried to explain. “She is all around us. It is in her that we live and move and have our being. Without her there would not be this world.”

“Ha. I don’t see her, so it’s only logical that she doesn’t exist.”

To which the other replied, “Sometimes when you are silent, you can hear her, and you can sense her presence. I believe there is a reality after delivery and we are here to prepare ourselves for that reality when it comes.”

The following is a reflection on the reality of who God really is. Our natural tendency wants to make God into who we want or need God to be. If God is mystery, then God is always on some level the unfamiliar, beyond our comfort zone, beyond what we can explain or understand. In the fourth century, St. Augustine said, “If you comprehend it, it is not God.” Would you respect a God you could comprehend? Yet very often that is what we want – a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, our political and military systems.

The First Commandment says that we are not to make any images of God or worship them. We may think this deals only with hand-crafted likenesses of God. The Commandment refers mainly to images of God that we hold in our heads. God created human beings in God’s own image, and we try to create God in our image. In America, God looks like a white Anglo-Saxon male, although it states in Genesis 1:27 that “God created humankind in God’s own image; male and female God created them.” That clearly states that God cannot be only masculine.

We find it very difficult to let God be God. The Almighty is greater than our culture, our immediate needs, and our projections. We have created a God who fits into our small systems.

We have created a God who likes to wage war just as much as we do, and a domineering God because we like to dominate. We have almost completely forgotten and ignored what Jesus revealed about the nature of our loving Deity. If Jesus is the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) then God is nothing like we expected. Jesus is not a dictator or a patriarch, but the very opposite, one whom John the Baptist calls “a lamb of God” (John 1:29).