It’s funny how we know God. It’s funny how we know anything.
I, personally, had a really early sense of God. I believe it was because my mother and grandmother talked about it a lot. A very early memory is of being stuck in my crib, in my yellow room, watching through the window the trees twisting and swaying in the wind and not being able to feel the wind because the window was closed. Trying to will myself to feel the wind, its temperature and moisture, and realizing I couldn’t. Instead, I would imagine I what it felt like to feel it; to be twisted by it. Other times, I would try to will the yellow of the wall to be a deeper, maybe more saturated yellow…like a daffodil or an egg yolk. Trying to will it to amp up from the really pale yellow painted on the wall of the nursery-of-the-unknown-gendered-expected-baby; a peaceful shade to encourage sleep and good behaviour. Eventually coming to the realization it was how it was. These were things I could not alter. I never felt alone, despite the alone time my mother enforced because Dr. Spock instructed. I had no fear or anger or loneliness. I don’t know why, but I strangely thought that it was God who put the fabulous colours in my head when I closed my eyes….yellows and reds and magenta and orange when I turned to the window, blue and purple and green when I looked to the wall. Slow and gliding, flickering, flashing…accompanied by the tones that I have always heard ringing; single tones, shifting harmonies, when all else is silent. These tones I thought were God possibly singing; the music of the spheres or something. I now know it is probably phlegm caught in some sinus cave or labyrinthine head tunnel, but whatever! I never felt alone. I was always entertained and took that as being loved, and being loved was God. God was always around to keep me company.
From a developmental standpoint, like Fowler’s Intuitive-Projective stage offaith, a sort of natural understanding, an early construction the mind does to create an order of things. But having lived it, to label it as part of a developmental stage lessens the relationship and sort of takes God out of it. It makes the understanding of God somewhat scientific and psychological. This was different. I suppose it was an example of a naturally forming faith in God, of how a person figures how they fit in to all creation and to creator at the level of just being. Intellect and education, experience and knowledge are not required. It is the true being with God in the moment….the chronos. The thing is though, most of the time, it doesn’t stay like this. Growth and change happen. Relationships get complicated.
Once upon a kairos ….I stood, petrified, figuratively petrified. Although I had woken that morning in my yellow room to a yellow, sunny April Sunday after Easter, the subterranean hallway of the new Sunday School wing of the First Presbyterian Church in Freehold, New Jersey was a cold, damp, grainy lit, purple gloam. The fluorescent lights were off, and the only light was where the linoleum floor gleamed in patches from the sunshine that sang down the stairways from the bright lobby, and from the long, skinny, rectangle windows of the classrooms. That floor was like ice; shiny, cold, and slick. We have, since the 1960s, somehow lost our standards for gleaming linoleum, floors don’t do this anymore. The dark hallway was alive with the twice and three times reflected gleam in other places of the linoleum floor that kept reflecting on and on…to ceiling, wall, and back to floor...each one darker and more mysterious, but reflections ricocheting nonetheless; a movement of deepening understanding.
I stood, on the shiny lino, unable to breathe, turned to stone in that cold, dark hallway. What made me suddenly realize that what I had always known in my four years of life at that point was suddenly not good enough? I might not ever know. The black patent leather shoes (also reflective and several sizes too big to accommodate for next winter’s growth) digging into my skinny ankle bones, the lace anklets no protection. The Easter hat-medieval-coif-type thing made of white wicker and decorated with tiny bunches of colourful straw flowers, digging into the bone behind my ears. My starched lace dress scratchy at neck and arms, my ruffle-rumped lace underpants (on backwards so I could occasionally regard their beautifulness) all adding to the sensation, that quickening wonder and terror that this God-in-three-persons-blessed-Trinity was something, someone, somethree, way, WAY beyond my ability to understand….and there. In that spot, on that day, something sharp pinched within me. I was trapped in ignorance. I was full of fear over something from which I had always felt such love. I could not go forward or back! Even though, to me, God was perfection and love that could not be expressed in words but in the allness of all….in that awesome baby feeling when you wake up in the morning and nothing is bad or scary and all is in the hands of a God in control, and it’s a brilliant adventure, I was incomplete. You see, at that moment in time, the language of the Trinity, the language of the church struck me. Struck me like the legendary bolt out of the proverbial blue.
I don’t recall the reason I was alone, in the hallway. I think I might have been the one chosen to take the collection envelopes up to the office. Whether it was the dark, the damp, my solitude, or the fact that the Trinity (sung every Sunday in the Doxology and Gloria Patri) was expressed as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost…and ghosts, Holy or otherwise, are scary, I don’t know. I just, in that instant, had it all come tumbling down on me that what seemed so clear and natural, a God that created all and loved me, I suddenly didn’t get! Up until then didn’t know there was anything to “get”. I was now scared to death; Fine one moment, unable to move the next. What IS the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? What is a person? Why am I here? What is here? Everywhere I looked, my imagination formed crosses; concrete bricks….I saw a cross, reflective floor tiles…I saw a cross, knobbly ceiling tiles…I saw a cross, all patterns my mind created settled into crosses. I closed my eyes, and saw floating, colour-shifting crosses! I was freaked and frozen, jabbed from head to toe, and alone.
I had been quite happily walking down the steps, descending into the gloam from the sunny landing thinking, “There’s God, and Jesus, and The Holy Ghost and all are God…and God is in us…and God knows everything….How can Jesus be God’s son?…God’s boy and be God at the same time?....If God has a boy….and Mary is his mother… So, God is God’s own father but not his own mother? Was Jesus, when he prayed, praying to himself or the Father…and he was own Father, then? Does God the Father have parents? How would he know to be a father if he didn’t have one? And the Holy Ghost is both of these guys…only everywhere…and that’s what’s in us….And Jesus was around, and then he died and came alive again and no one else can do that, and then he was everywhere, but not now, but any day now will be around again.” I wanted with a want stronger than I had ever wanted before, to get it right. To know. To really, really know. In the right way that grown-ups did. And I could not.
I began to feel curious on the descent back to class….down the stairs towards darkness….like Alice down the rabbit-hole….or like an adventurer down a gigantic cave only to be met by a ginormous snake!
And that, is when I stopped. I made it to the middle of the dark hallway and could not move or breathe. It made no sense. It was everywhere and nowhere. It was coming to get me, but already here, in me even, although I couldn’t see it….I knew it was here…an unseen presence…a palpable force….but I sort of didn’t, or did I? The sense of love and completeness that I had always known was now somehow made confusing and bizarre; both too big and too small simultaneously. God had somehow become out of my league and I did not know what to do.
I was comforted by some nice woman. She came from one of the Sunday School rooms. In my memory, all the ladies of mothering age, except for the fat one who sang a lovely soprano, looked like either Jackie Onassis or Elizabeth Montgomery. She assumed I had slipped on the icelike linoleum and was afraid to walk. She offered to put masking tape on the bottoms of my new shoes so they wouldn’t be so slippy. My soul had been taped up enough that day (shameless pun) Plus, Buster Brown’s face had been branded into the leather and I didn’t want him covered up. She took me to my classroom where my mother was helping other kids do something inane like stringing dry macaroni into necklaces or ineffectively sticking cut magazine pictures on oaktag with mucilage. I felt sick. Every bit of me was disturbed vibrating out of tune, like a radio station not quite locked in. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t know where to look. I wanted to go outside. The Gloria Patri and Doxology ringing in my mind, not with joyous harmonies, but with clanging words that built disturbing images that did not connect to what, for me felt real. Why a Trinity? Why three? Or four? Why not five? Why was the God that was there limited in ways of being? Why the definition?! Why put words to describe something so wonderful?!
No one wondered with me. They usually got mad at my questions.
But for the understanding of the Doctrine of God, this simple place of wondering where it is that a natural theology and a Trinitarian one meet matters. It matters because folk will do one of three things. They will either not explore it, explore it and be disturbed until they get to a place that includes them, or they will walk away from not quite giving time to get to one of the first two options. The church’s Doctrine of God is tricky. And the trickiest part is finding where creation fits in the dance of God! As a faith leader (and mummy and granny *gulp*), I think of the simple, appropriate responses to anyone who questions how God is represented as a trinity. Migliore states (p 69) “God over us, God for us, God in us” and that seems like it would be a perfect simple start. The Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer language is not enough to let us know that it involves us.
Can we ever really know God? A creator of everything seems far too big for the created to comprehend. I did know, as a wee person in a crib, that I could not feel wind through a closed window, or with my mind change the value of a paint shade…yet knowledge wasn’t enough. My experience of not being able to affect it was involved in it somehow. My inability to know was part of it. Some unseen presence that was my experienced real, and the discomfort, of damp, dark, shoes, hat, and undergarments were just another part of the discomfort of what stuck inside my mind, my not knowing. I felt the realness of God and the fear of my sudden awareness of how much I didn’t know…..couldn’t know.
“Our wisdom consists almost entirely of two parts:”, writes John Calvin at the start of his Institutes, those two parts: “our knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
To know what we know of us….the self and the collective….how we have behaved historically, both in the Bible and in history. That is easy to get. But how about how we know God? From history, yes….the Bible, yes….but how can we ever come to the place where we could know the mind of God? That cannot be done. God is sovereign. The created can never comprehend the creator, yet we do know on some level when we meet; the mystical kairos times when time folds and peace (or awe), and we, are suspended in the thin place.
First, it might be worthwhile to question knowledge in general.
What is it to know? To get it right and know like the grown-ups really know is a big part of this. This is still the projection. That there is a level at which the knowing of God is absolute and there is one right answer and it unlocks the peace that we’ve all been seeking all along. To project this is wrong, not that there isn’t a knowledge that brings us peace, but in the knowing itself.
To know God, is not like knowing a mathematical formula, or a recipe, or a song.
James E. Loder, in a kind of a wordy way, gives a more incarnational definition.
“Knowing anything is to indwell it and to reconstruct it in one’s own terms without losing the essence of what is being indwelt. Indwelling is preparatory;
As we shall see, it winds the mainspring of the imaginative leap in which subjective involvement and objective provocation combine to constitute a spontaneous image, the crux of the knowing event.”
Subjective involvement…..objective provocation.
To know God. To have a Doctrine of God, what God is….who is doing the provoking? Objectively. Who is the objective provoker?
If we come to the place that we credit the Holy Spirit, that Ghost, that unseen Ruach, as the provoker as well as the sustainer then our imagination is the vehicle of the divine. God is revealed in not just creation, but in the work and thinking of the creation. A mighty muse, for sure and certain.
What works…or “Good Works”…if we think of Everyman accompany us into the Kingdom!
At home, that spring day once upon a time, I changed into play clothes, yet continued to feel the pressure of the pinchy Sunday ones. I went to the swing-set, and swang, not properly, but on my belly, the hard edges of the plastic seat digging into my ribs and gut, and I watched the damp red earth drying in pink patches, and green grass beneath me….there for a second then on to the next, back again….forward and back. Soothed by the pull of gravity that pulled me always back to Earth, I wondered on what it would be like to be an ant, or a shiny green beetle. What was it to know God to them? Did they fret that they didn’t have it right? Did they know who they were? What they were? Why they were? My peace was in the rhythm of the swing and in how I watched over that tiny life, like maybe something bigger watched over me. I prayed by humming along with the tension of gravity.
As breath and growth was in the spring ground, so it was in me, so it must be in God.
The saddest truth beneath the thin veil of that tale is that my questions, despite the fact that I was four, could have been addressed but were dismissed. My whole life, in many ways, has formed like so many generations of coral around the skinny four year old stuck on the shiny linoleum in the Sunday School hallway that Sunday after Easter.
Strangely, had I been told that day of Augustine’s quote that if you could understand it…it can’t be God…It might have helped. That’s a great answer. And after forty years of wrestling with the imagery of the Trinity, of feeling it confining and then not grand enough, hearing that quote not only removed my anger and confusion, but made me love the Trinity. It also would have helped if it had been pointed out that it is somewhat Biblical…sort of….at the end of the day, it is still a bit much for us to try to define God. I think, deep down, I think we shouldn’t utter the name of the Almighty….really, who are we to think we should? The thin places, the kairos times when somehow God is near…and we sense a shift in our reality and understanding. Heavenly mountaintop transfigurations, or the trepidus descents into a hole in the earth to meet the gaping mouth of a giant snake… the bowels of our understanding to find…wisdom….in the form of a serpent…meeting me to say something really philosophical like “true wisdom comes from knowing that you know nothing…so, you’re ok after all!”. After all this time, I am back to yellow. Staring into yellow and wishing to deepen it!
And it’s the yellow I see each morning in the shifting cloud sky. The colour of dawn clouds, that as it’s dancing, you can concentrate on the pink and pink stands out, on orange and out comes the orange, on yellow out it comes, advancing….yet is always a kind of a yellow. And then it shifts. That, for me, is the only way to understand the Triune God. Swirled together, distinct yet inseparable, and for most of the day happening out of sight yet still there…shifting and twisting….a wind, a Ruach, felt honestly, or observed moving as if behind glass….still there. Always there.
