The role of our images of God in our spirituality

Spirituality is about God who reaches out to humanity and creation.

This sounds beautiful. Who would not desire a relationship with God?

But we can understand God in many ways. Very often we think about God as the God who requires from us good behaviour and judges us lovingly, but strictly when we fail to perform. We then feel we need to be careful before this God – God is watching us, following every move of us and sees to it that we behave well.

This God has power, but uses the power to see that we do our duty and that we know our place.

We respect this God. But secretly we also fear the relationship God seeks with us. It is, ultimately a dominating relationship in which we play the role of those who are overpowered and which requires from us obedience and even servility.

And, since we are made in God’s image, it often means that we too become strict, measure others according to their performance and keep them in their place. The relationship between those who serve this God is often a distant one.

Or we could see God as someone who knows our hearts, longs for us, who accepts us despite our performance and behaviour and who excludes no one from the abundant grace.

God is then in the first place a God who saves rather than judges. There is divine power, but it is a power that enlightens us, inspires and motivates us to live a life of devotion and faithfulness.

And as we see so much brokenness around and among us, we reach out to share the divine love with all who need strength and power to stand up, to be healed and to live a new life. Our spirituality seeks to share, to include, to accept and to love.

We recognise this God in the forgiving Father of the Prodigal Son who embraces and kisses the sinner who rejected the divine home, or as the God who gives grace unconditionally to the sinner on the cross – even at a late, very late stage. Or we see God as the One who listens with joy to the confessing prayer of the tax collector or we know it is this God with whom Jesus spends many hours in prayer of solitude, by whom he is comforted and strengthened for the most challenging times. It is the God whose will Jesus desires above anything which he wanted and desired. This God attracts us through endless, intimate, powerful love.

Our spirituality will depend a lot on what we know of God: do we know him as the strict, distanced Observer or our lives or the God who shares love in abundance? Do we become, like God, the ones who judge and exclude, or do we reach out and incude - unconditionally. Do we share intimacy, or do we measure and sum up?

There is so much to be said about the simple statement that spirituality is about God who desires a relationship with humanity and creation.