The pictures of God given in scripture and by tradition are far-ranging, startling, even violent. God in Samuel is a punisher of false priests who are careless with their vows. God cuts them off and breaks the priestly succession. God is a military commander sending Israel into battle or a mysterious presence that hovers over the mercy seat set above the ark in the center of the tent of the Holy of Holies. God is a high tower, a doorway, the one who sees our fear when our daughter is sick, the one who breaks the rules, relativizing them, knocking them out from under us as a prop we constantly misuse to defend us against the immediate experience of the religious imagination. By tradition, God comes to us as the One who nurses our beginnings as in John of the Cross, as the One who awaits our entrance into the central rooms of our Interior Castle, as in Teresa of Avila, as the One mysteriously born in our souls, as in Meister Eckhart, a winecask, as in Catherine of Siena, or as a Trinity of gemstone, fire, and word, as in Hildegaard of Bingen, as the abyss of omnipotence, working on the soul with a relentless love that is “terrible and implacable, devouring and burning without regard for anything,” as in Hadewijch of Brabant. The task for each soul, and for the clergy as guardians of the soul, is always to ask, to ponder, and imaginatively to weave connections across the gap between the two kinds of images, the personal and the traditional. No preaching - or counseling or direction - can reach very far that does not take into account our unconscious and highly idiosyncratic images for God.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
God, help me to experience your extreme otherness. Help me to be expanded by my knowledge of you to encompass greater complexity and compassion. Help me to hear your word in all its strange forms.
"a Trinity of gemstone, fire, and word, as in Hildegaard of Bingen"
Wow! I've got to get my hands on Hildegaard's writings. The combination she suggests of gemstone with fire and word titillates, soothes and grabs me by my religious imagination to enter more truly the halls of Godess and worship at her feet, even as i fear being burned to a crisp there.
Thank you, Lindsay, for revealing passages such as these for contemplation. Thank You, Higher Power, for using Lindsay as a channel to tune in Your powerful, loving grace.
Post a Comment