Devotional by Angela Smith
June 13, 1999
Some of you know I was baptized as an infant in the Roman Catholic Church. Some of you may not know I was expelled from catechism at the age of six. Even at that tender age, I was every priest's and nun's nightmare. While all the other children were dutifully memorizing the "right" answers, I was asking questions and doubting everything being said. I can't help it. I was born a religious liberal.
The essence of liberal religion is that its followers are natural skeptics. We feel free and driven by a responsibility that compels us to continually question, searching always for greater truth. And surprisingly, because of this, I feel my Christian faith and witness is all the stronger.
A liberal faith is not a static faith. It is constantly changing. And so my notions of God have also changed over the years. But mostly I have to confess when I think of God, I think of something in the abstract - something beyond definition and description only experienced. Thinking of God in a personal way or in the particular has always been difficult for me. I shy away from those who presume to speak for God and especially those who claim God has given them all the answers. When someone asks if Jesus is my personal savior, I want to take off in the other direction. To me God is so vast a concept, it's humbling to even say the name. However, that doesn't mean I address my prayers to whom it may concern. It also doesn't mean that in the course of my life I haven't experienced direct relationships with the sacred and divine. It's just not my style to talk to every stranger on the street about it. To me religious experience is a deeply personal and private thing - something precious and usually impossible to put into words, anyway.
But as I've grown older and my hair has grown blonder, I've also realized speaking of abstractions, speaking of God only in terms of love, justice, compassion, mercy and so on are not enough to sufficiently feed the soul. I've come to believe all of us need a more personal relationship to the sacred and holy. I've come to believe it's not a bad thing to speak of God in the particular - a first person God made real through human hearts, human hands, human hopes, human minds.
I recall being in a discussion several years ago with some friends. We were sharing our understandings of God. These were friends who admitted they talked to God frequently and felt very comfortable doing so. I told them I felt God was too vast a being to be narrowed down to a single personhood to be addressed as if in casual conversation. My friends listened politely.
Later when I thought about what I had said I felt embarrassed and ashamed. How could I have been so smug, so super-intellectual, so condescending. Who was I to put down their religious reality? How presumptuous for me to speak about God - my all encompassing, universal, cosmic god of love. In my own way of defining God, I had boxed God in - just as surely as the individual who refers to God as the Man Upstairs. If God is so vast and immanent, why is it contradictory that God can't also be personal enough to be addressed in the first person, singular.
Just the other day I had a great insight into the personhood of God. I was wat ching a father console his crying and fussing infant son. The father picked the child up and the child quickly calmed. Babies very early learn to recognize the familiar comfort of their parents, and when they are unsettled want that security. Looking at the infant in his father's arms, I could easily imagine why people want their God to do the same.
Who has not felt, throughout life, moments of great fear or despair and wished to be sheltered from the storm. It is only natural to seek the most secure and welcome place, which in our deepest memory is the arms of our mother and father. To seek this is healthy and understandable. And so is the very personal concept of looking upon God as all-loving, all compassionate parent -- always there, always ready to pick us up, to comfort us and embrace us.
God in the abstract and God in the particular. Divine mystery, beyond definition. God of beauty, of love, of justice and mercy. To this God I give my allegiance. And yet within this grand and glorious mystery I hear also the still, small voice and occasionally feel the Presence, if not the touch of God in the particular, god in the first person, the Thou of my existence which gives me to know I am never, never alone.