![]() Our natural egocentricity 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 what we’re used to, beyond our comfort zone, beyond what we can explain or understand. It takes a long time for us to allow God be who God is. In his book, A Spring Within Us, author and Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr offers insightful words in this direction. Is it little wonder to you that the First Commandment is “Have no other gods before me – and – make no graven image of God” (Exodus 20)? Or, could it be that the stories of the Old and New Testaments are stories of people, not unlike myself, who were seeking to live their lives as faithfully as they could, inside a world and universe they barely understood, and most often, with ideas, beliefs, opinions, and notions about God and of God that were very limiting, often loaded with assumptions and presumptions, and, very likely, in many instances, just plain wrong? That many of these same depictions of God were filled with wrath and even petty, jealous vengeance on His part from time to time…įurther, it never occurred to me to question, Is the God I see described, talked about, and, sometimes, made to actually speak in the Old and New Testament really the real God? It never occurred to me to think that the picture of God I saw in the stories of the Old and New Testament were often incomplete, sometimes inadequate, and quite likely full of prejudice for one person over the other. Furthermore, I was taught to believe that, if I truly believed that my prayers could be answered by him that was enough to persuade him to grant me my requests or give me what I believed I needed.
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