IMAGES OF GOD IN TIME AND SPACE

Theology Today, Jul 2004 by Henry, Patrick

My speculation on images of God in time and space begins with the black and white of Kansas, the Technicolor of Oz, and Dorothy's return, on waking up, to a black and white Kansas. Where and when I see God are more vivid to me than what I see. Space and time-the way we think about them and, even more, the way we feel about them-determine our images of God. The Wizard of Oz, great as it is, missed a chance to teach a great lesson about God. Why, when Dorothy opens her eyes, isn't Kansas, like Oz, over the rainbow? The question is whether, when we've been to the edges of the universe and the limits of time, we come back to Kansas and still see it in black and white or in color.

"I ONCE COULD SEE, BUT Now AM BLIND"

More than four hundred years ago, Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515-82) confidently and peremptorily dismissed the problem of "spirit, mind, or soul" when she said, simply, "they all seem the same to me."1 A Barbara Walters 20/20 segment (25 October 1998) offered a dramatic illustration of Saint Teresa's point. Walters revisited a man who, she said, had more than thirty years earlier, in 1967, provided her most memorable interview ever.2 Robert Smithdas, totally blind and totally deaf since age four, had in the interim married. His wife, Michelle, has also been totally blind and totally deaf for most of her life. Their independence and their ability to communicate with each other and with the rest of the world are as astonishing as any human activity I am ever apt to witness. And the television sequence began in church and ended in church, with Bob and Michelle receiving the Eucharist. It included a haunting poem Bob wrote in praise of God, "to him who woke me when my whole life slept."

If I had suspected that images of God, knowledge of God, depended on sight and sound, the interview set me straight. Touch can quite clearly serve perfectly well, and I now suspect that Bob and Michelle, who can't see or hear, have richer images of God than I do, with my eyes and ears in pretty good working order. Mind, body, spirit, soul, self: They're all the same. And, as I marveled at the faith of these two people, I wondered whether the closing down of two of their senses might have helped them preserve the original, natural knowledge of God that Robert Coles describes in his book, The Spiritual Life of Children (1990), knowledge that I dimly remember once having. A friend of mine says that her adult spiritual journey has been a sustained effort to recover what she knew about God when she was a child and that adults kept telling her could not be true. Perhaps the Smithdases were spared the adult deconstruction of what they have known all along. They turn "Amazing Grace" inside out: "I once could see, but now am blind"-and their gratitude to God appears boundless.

What is the setting for our images of God? A highly influential tradition of theology in this century has declared that the Bible's picture of the universe is a burden we must jettison. I came of age theologically on the wave of demythologizing, the dismantling of the alleged "three-storied universe," with hell below, heaven above, and the earth in the middle. You can certainly find pictures like this in the Bible, but they are not all there is, and they need not be taken literally. Indeed, "up" and "down" probably were not intended literally in the first place. If we read the Bible as poetry rather than as philosophy or physics, we find the setting far less confining, far less cramped, than the demythologizers thought it to be. When the psalmist talks about making a bed in Sheol, the place of departed spirits, or dwelling in the uttermost parts of the sea, or ascending into heaven, the psalmist is likely doing what poets always do: being concrete, being suggestive, saying God is too big to get around, too high to get over, too low to get under, and quite impossible to get away from. People in love, like Bob and Michelle Smithdas, talk like this all the time.

IT ALL LOOKS DIFFERENT

My own journey of discovery has some parallels with Dorothy's dream trip to Oz. There is continuity between the world I knew and the world I have come to know, but it all looks different-and permanently so. I have come to feel more at home in the world, as Dorothy did ("Aunty Em, there's no place like home!"). And, like Dorothy, I know connection, community, in a new way. It didn't take a tornado to set my imagination off and running, but the effect has been no less traumatic and exhilarating than Dorothy's ride on the wings of the storm.

I grew up thinking God was in charge and had plans. Sovereignty and providence were God's by right and by nature. The king in control was simply who God was, what God did. This image of God depended on a view of space that encompassed territory and time that was shaped like an arrow. God was the supreme strategic planner. I don't think I ever believed that we could always figure out the plan, but our inability to do so was our problem, not an inherent feature of the plan itself. It's not too hard to admit the uncertainty principle as a limit on our knowing. Saint Paul got it right: "We see as in a mirror, dimly" (1 Cor 13:12). But, really to acknowledge that the uncertainty principle is embedded in the world we know, and not just in our knowing, is to start wondering what kind of sense it makes to say that God has plans. There is much wisdom in the paradox that "God draws straight with crooked lines," but in the topsy-turvy geometries that now describe our world, the definitions of straight and crooked aren't given in advance.