from the Director - Our God – a vulnerable lover?
I have a Leunig cartoon on my office wall in which a man meets God in the person of the wounded Samaritan lying on the side of the road. God says to the man, "Help me I am wounded." You’re not God," says the man, "God is all powerful." "I am all-vulnerable," says God, "I am in pain. I am at your mercy." It was too unbearable for the man, he became so infuriated, he killed off that God.
The cartoon is revealing. Most of us want God to be powerful because we would like to be powerful, to be in control, not to suffer. We fear the pain, chaos, the lack of order and certainty if vulnerability is at the heart of life. Yet, one of the most telling images of the Old Testament is that of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant and in the New Testament, the Lamb of God. Jesus is the Lamb of God, the Suffering Servant who takes the sin and suffering of the world on himself. He does not fight back by "putting out the flickering flame or crushing the bent reed."
Retreat directors will have us spend time discerning our image of God, I believe, because we tend to ‘divinise’ the person we would like to be. If we are not careful God can be a projection of our own needs.
I read an article by an English Dominican priest, Herbert McCabe, in which he spoke of the common misconceptions that distort our image of God. One of the most powerful and common misconceptions is the one of a God who rewards our good actions and punishes bad. But McCabe argues that God, properly understood does not change in response to our behaviour. Rather, it is we who change. Sin makes us see not the real God but a projection of our guilt, in the form of "some kind of judge."
But the message of the parable of the prodigal son shows us that God is longing for us to live and be happy and thereby reveals not the harsh judge of guilty self-projection but the face of infinite love. God loves us but so often we cannot believe it because we cannot forgive ourselves.
Fr Noel Connolly
director@columban.org.au
