Our journey of faith begins with a paradox: We worship an unknowable God. St. Thomas Aquinas described it perfectly when he wrote: “This is the ultimate in human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know Him.”  When God spoke to Moses at the burning bush on Mount Horeb, Moses responded saying, if my people ask me the name of who it is that sent me, what should I tell them?  God answered: “I am who I am.”  And again he simply repeated: “I am.”  Meaning: I am all that is.  All that was and all that will be.  A great – if somewhat cryptic – answer describing something so vast that our human minds don’t really have the capacity to fully grasp it.  

But it’s in our human nature to want to know things. To solve puzzles, to uncover mysteries, to constantly be discovering things. With the internet and search engines like Google, the time between not knowing something and knowing something is non-existent. 

We’re going to do whatever it takes to know this vast and unknowable God, all the while humbly acknowledging that we can never really truly know all that God is.  

Because we’re human, we can only try to define God in human terms.  We assign human attributes to God. To describe him the way we would describe a human person. It’s ironic because we know that we were created in God’s image – to be like God– but we spend our lives trying to conform God into our image – in other words, to explain ways that God is like us.  This is perfectly ok to do; in fact, it’s all we really can do (and in fact, it’s something we see Jesus do every time he told a parable).  But this attempt comes with two precautions.

1. We don’t want to get stuck with one particular way of seeing God.  For example, if you only see God as a loving father, you’ll miss the opportunity to get to know God as a healer, teacher, friend, or savior.  We don’t want to limit ourselves to just one image.

2. Sometimes our images of God – described in human terms – can be distorted or just plain wrong.  

When I was little, I pictured God as an old man.  Long flowing white hair and beard. He was rarely smiling and he lived high up in the clouds.  Why might this be problematic?

• God was remote and distant
• God was very separate from my lived experience (“up there”)
• God was extremely lofty and intimidating
• God was a man, which for me as a young girl, put another kind of distance, even if I wasn’t consciously aware of it

This early image of God shaped my view for many years.  And probably lingered until I was 21 years old and attended my first spiritual retreat on the shores of Rhode Island.  Here I came to know a God so very different from the distant old man with the long, flowing beard.  

Jesus was both human and divine.  These two seemingly incompatible ways of being are brought to perfect union in Jesus.  It’s almost a circular story.  God created us in his image, but because of our human limitations, we have difficulty wrapping our minds around that image. So God becomes human to show us how to become more like God.  In the words of St. Athanasius: “He became what we are that we might become what he is.”

Jesus had an amazing way of using human stories, human nature, human relationships, and in fact, his very own humanity to teach us about God.  He used metaphors and examples from everyday life. Things that the people of that time would easily know and understand…and we can still understand today with a little interpretation and study.

You could almost make a picture book out of the parables and teachings of Jesus.  A woman searching for a lost coin.  A mustard seed.  A fisherman casting his net.  A compassionate father waiting for his son to come home.  Through the prayer of imagination, these are scenes that we can picture in our minds.  Jesus knew the power of imagery, so he used these vivid stories and images to speak to our hearts and to help us know God.

So much in Scripture can be used in helping us embrace new images of God and continue to discover God in new ways:  The Bible (both Old and New Testaments) contains hundreds of images depicting the nature of God.  Yet no single image fully captures who God is.  These different metaphors are like puzzle pieces.  Each one beautiful in its own right, but as we piece them together, we get a more and more complete image of our God. It’s a puzzle meant to be worked on over a lifetime, not quickly solved and put away.

Photo by Jackson David on Unsplash