Ageless beauty

[chiefspymaster]

Faith is hard. As I walk out a relationship with Christ, things like poverty, and relativism, and suffering, and boredom, and mean-spirited people who do awful things in the name of Christ don't disappear. In fact, as I walk on, farther from the initial passionate burst of finding God, these hard realities trouble me more. There are times when I

Comments

[anonymous]

Hi Alison, what you said reminded me a bit of St. John of the Cross, a mystic who had some insight into what he calls the "dark night of the soul". John Coe at Biola wrote a really good article about in the Journal of Psychology and Theology, which I can forward to you (but I forgot your email address!).

However, I find it interesting that we presume being in a relationship with God to somehow be the same as being in an interpersonal relationship, that somehow we are on equal footing with God just as we would be in a relationship with another person. It is interesting to me that when we are having a hard time, when we don't hear God, when we don't feel the passion, or when we just get distracted, we come to feel let down by God, or we've failed, or something has gone wrong. Somehow, someone or something is at fault. God isn't answering questions. The world is too enticing. I've become jaded. Whatever the reason is, we make attributions in the same way as we would in interpersonal relationships.

Simeon and I have often discussed this because he doesn't seem to go through these spiritual highs and lows that I do. Somehow the world can fall apart, he can be terribly unproductive at his work, feel like a failure, etc. and still really feel that God loves him. He has never felt apathy or bitterness about God. Even when he wasn't going to church or was totally being "in the world", so to speak, he still had no doubt about God's love for him. I know we can all say that to some degree, but I definitely have a harder time believing it!

What do you make of this idea that our relationship to God sometimes is so anthropomorphized that we treat it like a relationship with another person? Where is God's transcendence in the midst of all of it? Also, what do you make of the dichotomy between what we believe in our heads and in our hearts? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Bonnie Zahl

[chiefspymaster]

Bonnie! So nice to hear from you!

What great questions... I was wondering the very thing as I was writing it, whether I could really apply something as human and fallible as marriage to a relationship with God. One argument would be that marriage is as close as we can get to mimic a relationship with God; but this also brings up a question of how much we idealize marriage and gloss over its realities - if we get down to the nitty gritty of it, can we really use it as an adequate comparison?

I think the blunt answer would be no - that is, if we're looking for something mimetic. If I was trying to say "relationship with God" = "relationship with husband/wife", God is obviously reduced a lot and husband/wife is probably idealized as well. But fortunately (at least, I think it's fortunate), we're not looking at a mathematical equation. This is the lit major speaking, but I think that's the beauty of metaphor; it alludes to the relationship without ever assuming it to be complete. Metaphor is always suggestion something more... at least, that's what I think.

Though I haven't looked into this, off the top of my head I'd say that anthropomorphizing God's relationship to us is biblical. I'm thinking of the end of Isaiah where God is said to be like a mother, Jesus's parables which put God the Father in metaphorical relationships with people, and of course calling God "Father" at all. But I don't think any of these are meant to be complete revelations of our relationship with God, I think they're meant to be acknowledged as metaphor signalling something greater. I guess another question would be, if we don't anthropomorphize God, how else can we talk about him? Is any of our language adequate to capture God's relationship with us?

What you say about Simeon's view is really interesting.. I don't know whether it starts in your head or your heart. I think from our SNA days we've learned to rely on our heart quite a bit, and I've been learning these past few years here how it's different for people, and the value of the head-knowledge of God. I'm tempted to question the division between head and heart in the first place... they're connected somehow, but how and how much?

I think there *is* a danger of making our relationship with God too human when we start representing it as flawed as some of our human relationships. I worry sometimes about the overall trend in modern worship songs, where we see a lot more of "me" and a lower-case-you-god than Eternal God in the lyrics. I've quite possibly done the same thing above... but I hope I and others treat the interpersonal stuff as a stand-in, a temp, for something that we can't yet fully know. And right now, I think I'm of the mind that anything that helps someone experience some facet of God's love for us can't be all bad!

Ooh, you've generated more thoughts than this, Bonnie. But that's all the brainput I can coherently manage right now :) I'd love to keep talking about it somehow, and am interested in that article...