Unexpected Friendship

In light of my recent post, "The Faces of God: God the Unexpected," I want to share a story with you.

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I lit my cigarette and began to walk down the garden path on the monastery grounds.  It had proven to be an extraordinarily long day.  The stress and anxiety had been building all day in our small flat in the retreat annex; the children had indeed driven my wife to the brink.  So when I arrived back from a day journey to interview a priest, I walked into the thick of it rather unexpectedly.

As I strolled along the gardens, I heard the bell calling the community to Compline--the final service of the day.  Compline simply means "complete" and it's a way of completing the day with a beautiful service praising God for the blessings of the daytime.  I fell down into the comfort of a wooden bench, perched strategically behind some blossoming flowers.  Privacy, I thought to myself, and a brief escape from the world.  I could not bring myself to enter the 

monastic church that evening, I was beyond my capability to use words or find a sentence to utter in the coming twilight.

After I snuffed out the butt, I sat there in a daze.  I wondered all about the predictable stuff: did we make the right decision to move our small family to England for a time?  At what cost was this to my family to merely live out one of my longest-held dreams?

Before I came round, I could see the movement of black cassocks in the distance.  I snapped to and glanced down at my watch.  Blimey, I thought, Compline was over and so was my free time. I needed to get back to help get the children to bed.  While I had not discovered any new answers to my cause, I had enjoyed a brief respite from the hell of cranky children and a distant spouse.  I dreaded going back, fearing another screaming, crying meltdown from the kids.  My ears were exhausted.  

Just then, a black cassocked monk strolled along the path.  He rose about five feet in the air

 and his grey scapular was neatly swaying as he walked with his hands clasped behind his back and his head hunched over.  It was too ironic or coincidental that this one brother of the Community had taken to fancy night walks following Compline and here I was in his pathway. He was clearly deep in reflection or what one professor loves to say when he daydreams, "off in wonder, love, and praise!"  I had met Father John several weeks ago during a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham down in Norfolk.  He is a Guardian of the Shrine and a runner.  A monk-priest from Northern Ireland, John has been in the Community for nearly thirty years--an incredible source of spiritual wisdom!  I remember vividly waking up from my power nap on the bus back from Walsingham when I overheard him talking about running to a nearby seminarian--he must be in his late 60's and the shock jarred me out of my slumber.  What was more surprising was this seemed to be the first time I felt as though I had something in common with another person in the Community.  Running, I thought, was the perfect God-given commonality so I went for it and begin a conversation with John.

"Father John," I cried out, "do you have a minute?"  Knowing full well that the CRs enter into their silence following Compline lasting until Matins, I chanced it.  I was desperately reaching out.  Being fully pastoral, John broke his silence and sat down next to me on the bench.  I had managed to pull myself together by this point, wiping away tears and fearing my awful smoke-stained smell.  

It did not take any remarkable power of observation to see that I needed the company and someone to talk to about what was going on inside.  John was able to talk sweetly in his Irish voice and helped me calm down.  His faith and insight truly makes him stand twenty feet into the air even though I tower over him. 

Thus began an unexpected spiritual friendship that continued on throughout my time at the Community.  He agreed to serve as my temporary confessor and spiritual guide and I remain forever grateful to him.  Just as I began to think I was alone and disconnected to the community that I found myself in, God gave me Father John.  It surpasses the explainable coincidence, this was truly a gift and one that I quickly recognized in the silhouetted figure of a small, Irish monk off in the distance.

God the Unexpected was the face that I saw that evening.  I even smiled afterwards thinking about this blog post and knowing full well that I had encountered this joyous face in the midst of my own stress and spiritual loneliness.  Thanks be to God for this and for what I believe will be a friendship for the rest of my life.

Faces of God: God the Unexpected

Today in the Church of England's lectionary (it was also read in The Episcopal Church), we read two important lessons that I think reveal the face of God the unexpected.  The Old Testament lesson was from I Samuel 17:32-49 and the Gospel was Mark 4:35-41.  In both cases I was struck by the imagery of being caught unprepared and called out by God. I heard the story of David and Goliath the Philistine in a new, unexpected way this morning.  If one of Israel could kill Goliath, then the battle should end.  David, being chosen, is clothed by Saul with armour, "mail" was the translation we read today.  Something about the clothing remains powerful to me--it wasn't David at all.  He couldn't walk in the heavy suit, it was silly. How often do we put on images for ourselves only to be taken as ridiculous?  We try on things that our not suited for us in an effort to protect ourselves.  All the while, God calls on us to come out as we are and into the unknown with faith.  It seems no coincidence, here, that David cannot wear the protective armour, but must go out in front seemingly vulnerable and possibly on a suicidal mission.

Armed with his stones, the only weapons he knows, David relies on God's faithfulness and ultimately slays the giant with a single stone.  I've heard this story many times before but I never considered the idea of being called out by God to perform this task by ordinary means by ordinary people.  The image of one shepherd going out in front of the army lines, leaving behind the protection of the masses, David goes alone with God to meet the giant for what seems to be an impossible task.  Fear, yes, fear would be coursing through me at that point.    

Saul clothed David with his amour; he put a bronze helmet on his head and clothed him with a coat of mail. David strapped Saul’s sword over the armour, and he tried in vain to walk, for he was not used to them. Then David said to Saul, ‘I cannot walk with these; for I am not used to them.’ So David removed them. Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the wadi, and put them in his shepherd’s bag, in the pouch; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine."

I Samuel 17: 38-40

The Gospel lesson from Mark follows this same parallel.  Jesus is asleep in the boat with his disciples when a raging storm happens and causes great consternation among the sailors.  Our Lord simply asks them whether or not they have faith in God's providence.  Fear of death was all that they could think of in their future.  Jesus calms the waters and instantly their faith is restored.

Why is all this important?  God comes to us in the unexpected ways of storms and giants, calling us out of our spheres of comfort, out of our false clothing, to confront those fearful things that keep us from the love of God.  Testing?  No, I don't believe that God puts tests in front of us to see what we're made of, but rather God calls us to be authentic and stand for what and who we were created to be.  God the unexpected is the one who wants us to live fulfilling, happy lives, lovingly being who we are.  We stray from this out of fear, fear of acceptance, fear of the unknown, or worse to gain false comfort from money, job security, or anything else our culture deems important and necessary.  We do this for our will, not God's.  Thus, the storms and giants rise up as a way to strip away those things that are fleeting, like chaff in the wind. God's will and God's faithfulness is the foundation of our being, straying from that means trouble looms on our horizon.

God may act in unsuspecting ways, but I believe that all things come to some certainty in God's providence.  God the unexpected is trying to fulfill our expectant hope of eternal life in the Kingdom of Christ.  So mind those giants in your life.  Stand up and fight.  The storms will cause titanic waves to flood your sense of security, so stave them off with the faith from above. Be at ease knowing that you strive in your everyday life to live deeply into God's will.

Faces of God: God the Friend

If God was on Facebook, would you send him a friend request?  Since I don't have any "naughty" photos of anything at all, I would not hesitate to friend him!  As of this writing, there are currently 524,033 fans of Jesus Christ on Facebook, I wonder why there aren't more? Would God be the old-fashioned sort who would shy away from all things social-networking? Or would God be an i-Phone toting hipster? Perhaps both.

God seeks out relationship in any form possible.  God the friend is the sort who is comfortable in both groups and individually.  What would God's Myers-Brigg personality be, I wonder? Either way, I sense that God's idea of friendship is lasting.  As Christians, we believe that through the waters of baptism we are re-born into a new life in Jesus Christ.  We are bound to him as he is to us. The Body of Christ, the Church militant on earth, is where we strengthen those bonds as we move through the process of life.  That friendship is a bond that sustains heartaches, peer-pressure, and all the anxieties of social life in community.  

God is the chief friend, the "best" if you will.  The model is forged throughout the whole of Scripture.  As it is, God acts first and always first and relieves us of any anxiety of acceptance. God's will is to bind us into the common humanity in the life of the Kingdom.  There is no pressure from God to buy certain labels or behave differently in or around certain people. God's will is to be the friend who frees us up to be who God wants us to be--who we were created to be.    

I doubt there's any double-crossing, gossiping, or even the ultimate betrayal with God as friend. If anything, we're quick to claim that God has disappeared or somehow abandoned us--Our Lord's cry of dereliction from the cross, for example.  The reality is, and proved only by one's own journey of faith, that God is present in the darkness too.  It is easy to see and feel the presence of God in the good things of life, blessings are always nicer than pain.  Yet my own experience has shown that the pain of life we sometimes experience leaves wounds that are transformed into blessings.  Henri Nouwen's "wounded healer" concept nails this down succinctly. God is in the darkness and sometimes so close to us that we believe we've been left for dead.  Friendship, relationship, and covenant are bonds that bind and last forever.  God as the instrument in forging such bonds reveals the powerful love that links us to our creator.

I need God as my friend and confidant.  I need to know that someone cares for me while catching me every time I fall down.  God never seems to grow weary of me and all my peculiarities, much less my poor decisions and sin.  God never gives up on me while I have given up on God at certain times in my life.  It is when I discovered God quietly in the darkness that I learned God's deep well of mercy and grace.  How often have we heard that when really bad things happen you discover who your true friends really are?  Enough said.

Faces of God: God the Enemy

We need God to be the enemy.  Why?  It's the age old question of theodicy:  God and justice. Why does God allow bad things to happen?  Job knows plenty of this.  God the enemy, God in the clouds playing puppeteer with creation.  Popular thought often portrays the Old Testament God as the God of anger, wrath, and destruction.  And somehow, with the flip of the page, the New Testament God is all-loving and now wants to enter into the course of human history. 

The reality is that we want to have a reason when something happens.  In Islam, the Arabic expression is insha' allah, or "if God wills."  Unfortunately, this idea gets applied equally to the tragic death of a child, news of cancer, and the unknowing depths of endless human suffering. Does God really will death and destruction for creation?  I believe the answer is an emphatic "no."  Following the days of creation in Genesis, God blesses the work by calling it good (Gen 1:31). The pain and suffering in the world is the result of sin--turning away from God's will and looking to our own for comfort and happiness.  Cancer is not from God, nor is HIV/AIDS, or even genocide for that matter.  From my experience of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) and working with death and dying in a hospital, I can speak from the depths of my faith that God is present somehow in the suffering and tears of humanity.  God's presence, whilst at times seems far away, is so close that we fail to recognize the comforting love of a friend.  God does not will destruction for creation, the rainbow set in the sky affirms God's promise to Noah that never again will God destroy the earth (Gen 9:8-16).

The only comfort that I can find in the problem of theodicy is simply that we find God's tears falling with our own.  We need to make God the enemy to rationalize why or how something so terrible could occur in our lives.  Again, see the Book of Job.  But even in Job's ordeal, he maintains faith.  Perhaps that's why this bit of the Old Testament gets a lot of attention because we cannot comprehend how and need to hear it over and over again.

There is no question that even in my own journey of faith I have blamed God for this or that offense, discovering only in the end that I am my own worst enemy.  I have also discovered that the more helpful route is to simply investigate where God is present in all my calamities.  That is the true question that we should be asking and the one that most likely contains the raw, painful answers that we cannot bear to face. God was not absent at Auschwitz; God was there amid the Hutu and Tutsi genocide.  God was there when I baptized 16-week old Jesus (Spanish) following his death.  God suffers with us because the suffering is not willed.  Yet, we do know that suffering and pain can serve as the furnace of transformation for our faith and life, but we cannot romanticize the tragedy.  

Living with the problem of theodicy is hard, faith-testing matter.  There is no one answer that completely satisfies the human heart, nor fills the cavernous voids of painful loss.  The only example we have is that of Our Lord on the cross, crying out in dereliction.  In the end, we do believe that God's justice is wrapped up in the Kingdom.  The Kingdom is where we live for God's will and not ours, where justice flows down like waterfalls, and everyone has just enough to eat.      

Faces of God: God the Lover

"God became man so that man might be engodded" 

~ St. Athanasius

The Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century did a lot for the Church of England.  In it, the reformers were harkening back to the age of the patristic Greek Fathers, that age of the Church when there was nothing "popish" within the institution.  One idea, however, that never seemed to gain much ground in Anglicanism despite the claims of the movement, was that of divinization or properly called theosis.  Known quite well in the Eastern Church, the concept of humanity's process towards becoming divine is deeply rooted in the Incarnation--some may easy say that this is the completion of that moment when the Divine and Humanity intersected in the womb of the Virgin.

What does this have to do with love?  Moreover, what does this have to do with seeing the face of God as a lover?  God creates out of love; humanity being formed in God's likeness and image is a powerful measure of God's love.  Eros, not agape, is the burning desire of God and humanity.  Eros is the Greek principle of a deep, erotic love which surpasses the mere physical limitations of human flesh.  Descending into the womb while exulting our human nature is the fullness of that love.  Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks, the legendary composer of the Christmas hymn "O Little Town of Bethlehem," is noted as saying that in this act of Incarnation we find, "the condescension of divinity and the exultation of humanity."  Ascent meets the descent and in that we know more about our God as the ultimate lover.  Interestingly enough, this may be the most erotic imagery in the whole of the Christian tradition.

So now let us move forward one more step.  God as lover woos us.  God woos us in the very wilderness we often find ourselves.  God creates, God provides, and God woos.  Even when Adam and Eve were kicked out of Paradise, God makes and provides clothing for them (Gen 3:23).  God is the constant lover of creation, bringing and calling it into the fullness of that lover.  We are no exception to this but often stand in the way of feeling God's tenderness or being tantalized by God's scent.  Thus, to accept theosis, one has to be willing to see inside the love that was born from above and to accept God's invitation to step onto the dance floor to take a spin with the Almighty.  I doubt that the principle here is to create millions of little gods and goddesses running around the Kingdom, but rather bring humanity to its fullness, to its completion which can only be found in God.  God took the first step in creation; the invitation has been issued and a reply is requested.

As is the case with any lover, there are the warts that we try to cover over and hide.  We don't want to be naked in front of the one that we try to seduce or vice versa.  The seduction of God is to be perfect bliss and causes the ultimate "release."  This release is complete and total freedom of the Kingdom of God which dawned in the coming of Christ, but alas is not yet fulfilled.  As we move closer with God in the dance of our lives, we take down those barriers and uncover the painful areas of lives.  Trust is the result of knowing that there is another hand out there supporting and guiding your spins.  The music is endless and so is the dance.  But there is always that fear of tripping over your feet or looking rather foolish with stiff legs.  

Will you fight?  Will you always accept God's advances?  Can you resist the heavenly aroma? We will certainly try!  We are human after all.  Theosis gives me hope that I'm always in process, always moving to a beat that my soul rhythmically gets even when I try and stand in the way. 

Personally, I can identify this image in my life.  The times when I have left the dance floor because of anger or simply lacking the courage to accept my own acceptance.  Each time I come back, I find that God is ready to pick up the beat again.  Ironically, there never seems to be the cursory, "I told you so."      

The Faces of God: God the Sibling

My brother and I are only separated by a year-and-a-half.  My mother loves to remind me that it was my brother who often served as my spokesman when we were little, he somehow could read my mind.  It was my brother who coaxed me into doing things, well, let's say that would provoke my parents just a little.  But, it was my brother whose solo heroism pulled me up out of the hot tub and saved my life as I was drowning.

While in our teenage years we began to grow apart as our interests no longer seemed to collide. I was interested in becoming a Boy Scout and immersing myself into that life.  My brother, perhaps more typically hormonal, was interested in girls and cars.  I learned how to play by myself and I explored a new world of imagination and creativity, but I knew I was alone more and more.  Somehow that seemingly lonely world was busy with games and escapades that kept me very active.  My brother used to pick on me about my weight as kid--he was literally thin as a stick and I was not.

The college years changed everything.  To everyone's surprise (mine too), I chose to attend the same college as my brother.  My last two years of high school were blissful, I had the house and my parents all to myself, and now I wanted to change everything.  My brother was in his junior year as I began as a freshman.  He was of legal drinking age and I was not--you see where this is going.  We quickly rekindled our bonds of affection and I also became very good friends with his friends!  I ended up having more upperclassmen friends than those in my own class, a mistake that would later hurt.  College was fun and it was fun because I had the opportunity to share two years of it with my brother.  The campus world dramatically changed following his graduation, I truly missed him.

Now in our young adult years, my brother and I continue to grow in our relationship.  He tends to be a better communicator than I am, he constantly calls me and my parents.  My brother is the one that comes up with the creative gift ideas for Mother's/Father's day.  Though now, the weight has been reversed and I am guilty of a few jabs to exact my revenge (and I say it all in the most Christian way possible!).  My brother is the one who never lets me go off into my own world of depression and self-pity; it is my brother who has saved my life on more than one occasion.

God as my brother?  Related by blood?  Would God call me fat?  Would God purchase beer for me as a college freshman?  Would God annoyingly call and check in with me whenever I was at a low point in my life?  

The thought that keeps emerging is the parallel between my brother's relationship and my relationship with God.  God does serve as our ultimate spokesman and God gives us the sort of curiosity that would lead a 13 year old to play with firecrackers.  I feel extremely fortunate to have the present relationship with my brother.  Though it's not often perfect, but I find that my brother is often much more forgiving than I am and he seems willing to hang in there no matter what.  My brother is without exception an old-school romantic, searching the horizon for the perfect sunset.  I envy that in him as well as his genuine goodness.

So the parallel:  my brother and I were close, grew apart, and then grew close again and continue to develop a mature brotherly relationship.  With God lies the same pattern.  Does God will the separation?  No.  Does God give us the tools we need to survive alone and help us find our way back?  Yes.  

I struggle a little with this imagery of God as Sibling, not because I don't have a saint-like brother, but because I know I have to expand the many faces that God lives.  I can and do see the image, though it's not one that seems to wrench my heart like the others.  What do you think?

    

The Faces of God: God the Child

Being a parent of two, very active toddlers has been both a tremendous joy as well as a tremendous challenge.  My oldest, Caroline, is full of life and personality.  Ordinarily, she knows right from wrong, and even boasts a smile just before she embarks on something destined to cause her Daddy some trouble!  My youngest, Tucker, is starting to talk and generally points and grunts to things that he wants.  I have now only begun to master the art of this communication after two years of stumbling.  

There are, of course, many tender moments with them:  seeing my son curled up in his Mommy's arms; Caroline sitting on my shoulders while she sings a song with words that only God knows; and my personal favorite, watching them both run up to greet me when I come home after a long day at the seminary.  Affection is everywhere in our house, but looming in the hallway is the dreaded "time out" corner.  Love is the fullness of being able to caress with one hand and firmly correct with the other; when this balance is not realized children will develop various sorts of behavior or personality problems.  Achieving this balance has been hard for me as a parent, especially now that I have a more developed relationship with my daughter as she grows.  I know it's her smile that melts my parental anger into a deep well of compassion when she does something wrong.

Can I image the face of God to be in my toddlers?  Without a doubt, yes!  From changing diapers to bath time, each moment is deeply rooted in the love between a parent and a child.  Children, much like I imagine God to be, have no sense of our boundaries, no sense of the baggage and limitations that we take on in our lives.  Whenever I hold my son up, he likes to rip off my eyeglasses and smack me on the face.  I can imagine God doing this too, saying to me, "Chad, here I am!  Look at me and pay attention!"  God as the child reminds me to see what I hold in the center of my life and focus on the real needs at hand.

God, just like my children, has no boundaries to maintain.  God is everywhere, sometimes smacking me on the face to get my attention whenever I stray.  The image of God the child does not offend me in the least as I feel the connectedness of relationship--God needing us just as we need God.  I would have never imagined that I would need a child in my life, but as I have experienced the awesome power of human birth I know that I need my children just as they need me.  Those needs--both mine and theirs--are organic and take many shapes and colors, and I am keenly aware of how my behavior and attitude towards my children will affect their development and future lives.  So too, my relationship with God, as it grows and matures, will reveal insights into the heart of God as well as my own.    

The Faces of God: God as Mother

I want to begin this reflection as "God as Mother" by borrowing from Henri Nouwen's famous book, Return of the Prodigal Son.  

"Often I have asked friends to give me their first impression of Rembrandt's Prodigal Son. Inevitably, they point to the wise old man who forgives his son: the benevolent patriarch.

"The longer I look at 'the patriarch', the clearer it becomes to me that Rembrandt has done something quite different from letting God pose as the wise old head of a family. It all began with the hands. The two are quite different. The father's left hand touching the son's shoulder is strong and muscular. The fingers are spread out and cover a large part of the prodigal son's shoulder and back. I can see a certain pressure, especially in the thumb. That hand seems not only to touch, but, with its strength, also to hold. Even though there is a gentleness in the way the father's left hand touches his son, it is not without a firm grip.

"How different is the father's right hand! This hand does not hold or grasp. It is refined, soft, and very tender. The fingers are close to each other and they have an elegant quality. It lies gently upon the son's shoulder. It wants to caress, to stroke, and to offer consolation and comfort. It is a mother's hand....

"As soon as I recognized the difference between the two hands of the father, a new world of meaning opened up for me. The Father is not simply a great patriarch. He is mother as well as father. He touches the son with a masculine hand and a feminine hand. He holds, and she caresses. He confirms and she consoles. He is , indeed, God, in whom both manhood and womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood, are fully present. That gentle and caressing right hand echoes for me the words of the prophet Isaiah: "Can a woman forget her baby at the breast, feel no pity for the child she has borne? Even if these were to forget, I shall not forget you. Look, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands."

Clearly, Nouwen reminds us that we need both masculine and feminine imagery when we speak about God.  I was challenged right at the beginning of my seminary formation to begin using "inclusive language" for God-talk.  At first, I really did not like using words like "Godself" in writing papers for class.  I was able, though, to move past this.  I remember having a conversation over inclusive language with my parents during the first Christmas break--my father refused to give in!

Why are we afraid to see God as feminine?  Do we lose something by the reference?  Quite the opposite, I believe.  "Expansive language" is more cutting edge these days, expanding the adjectives and metaphors for describing God.  We lose far more when we limit God and Godself to being simply male.  "There is no longer Jew or Greek," writes Saint Paul, "there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Eph. 3:28).  Put into the positive, there is both Jew and Greek, there is both slave and free, and there is both male and female in Christ. Paul understands that the distinctions are exploded in the risen Christ.  And yet, we are still afraid to loosen our masculine grip on God. 

Having had both parents in my life as a child, I saw clear distinctions between the roles of mother and father.  My father was the busy bank executive who did what he could to spend time with me and my brother--coming to the baseball games, Scout camp-outs, and the annual father-son fishing extravaganza.  Dad was everything that you would expect in a fatherly role. Mother, too, filled the womanly role. She was the one who cooked, cleaned, and also worked full-time outside of the home.  When you put the two parenting roles together, everything was covered.  Separated, my mother was the one who, more often than not, spent time listening to me and encouraging my creative side.  I was always close to my mother, and now in my adulthood, I am growing closer to both parents.  My mother never used guilt to force my hand in a decision. On the contrary, she excessively worried for me over the decision!  And still does, bless her heart. 

Growing up, I felt as though both mother and father helped expand my view of the world by offering unconditional love and support. When I fell, and I did quite often, they helped me get back up and examine where things went wrong.  They never protected me from the world, but rather let me see and feel my own way in it.  They were always a few steps behind me, just in case. 

God as Father fits the mold of my childhood; my theology was shaped by the roles my parents filled.  God as the bread-winner and busy executive. God as the person that needs a drink at five o'clock following a hard day of meetings, and so forth.  It was harder to accept God as the cook, God as the laundry lady, and God as the healer of all the scratches and cuts.  But it works, doesn't it?  It makes sense that God fills both parenting roles.  God certainly can fulfill both roles.  

Our Father and Mother, who art in heaven. . .

The Faces of God: God as Father

"God is not an object," screams my Theology and Ethics Professor during our first day in Seminary.  "Huh," I thought, "what a way to begin three years of spiritual formation!"  I realized his point in time--and he effectively made his point, over, and over, and over again--is that we tend to turn God into an object, a convenient and handy object.  There's a human tendency to do this and it can be spiritually dangerous.

The image of God as the grand old man in the sky works as a child, it is less helpful to me as an adult.  Yes, I grew up with that image, a God who lives high up in the heavens surveying creation and keeping count on our sins and offenses.  This idea is even less helpful as a sinning adult!  The problem with the grand old man image is that some faithful refuse to let go of it--God is father and that's that.  Pastorally speaking, this is also less helpful.  If we maintain that image or face of God, we lose sight of the creative God who created humankind in "our image" (NRSV translation).  God created us to be in relationship with us, not to leave us to our devices and demise.  We need God just as God needs us--a dynamic ongoing salvation history from God establishing the covenant with Abraham all the way to the Word made flesh in the Incarnation.  This relationship is repeatedly given credit throughout scripture.  

The God on high who sits in judgement does not help a young rape victim who is faced with the difficult decision over abortion, or the elderly man who keeps begging God to let him die.  We seek, above anything else, a God of Compassion.  "I AM the I AM," to me means that God is the God who remembers, the God who saves, the God who listens, the God who can change God's mind.  I think of God saying, "I AM the compassionate one."  Some remote God does not intervene in the course of human history.  A remote God does not enter into covenants with humanity, much less seek to fulfill them. Ours is a God of relationship.

I think it is extremely important to see that our ideas of God, and the many faces of God, change as our understanding--based on experience--changes.  The grand old man works for a small child, but as that child grows, so too does the image.  If God has been limited to an object, then the object remains static and unable to grow into a deep relationship with creation.  

In Book One of Saint Augustine's Confessions (Oxford, Penguin Ed.), Augustine writes, "how shall I call upon my God, my God and Lord?  Surely when I call on him, I am calling on him to come to me.  But what place is there in me where my God can enter into. . . Lord my God, is there any room in me which can contain you?  Can heaven and earth, which you have made in which you have made me, 

contain you?"

"We need God just as God needs us."

Augustine goes on to ask, "who then are you, my God. . . most high, utterly good. . . deeply hidden yet most intimately present, perfection of both beauty and strength, stable and incomprehensible, immutable and yet changing all things, never new, never old. . .In your mercies, Lord God, tell me what you are to me. 'Say to my soul, I am your salvation (Ps. 34:3). Speak to me so that I may hear.  See the ears of my hearts are before you, Lord.  Open them and 'say to my soul, I am your salvation.'  After that utterance I will run and lay hold on you. Do not hide your face from me.  Lest I die, let me die so that I may see it."

Even after the centuries when Augustine wrote this, we still wrestle with the many faces of God.  Wrestling is part of the journey of faith.  Take to heart one Augustine's most famous quotation from Confessions, "our heart is restless until it rests in you" (Oxford Penguin Ed.).We should wrestle with seeing God as a black woman, a Chinese teenager, or an Inuit man. Otherwise, I think we reduce God in size--we reduce the believer's capacity for the need of a certain face of God that speaks to them.  God is not an object!  And please, this is not reducing God to relativism either!  I think this idea is deeply embedded in the tradition of Byzantine iconography, where one is not allowed to write or paint a human image of God.  

It has taken me many years to grow in my relationship with God and how I see God.  I've stopped referring to God as just "Father" or any masculine reference for that matter.  God indeed has many faces, many voices (spoken and silent), and above all, God longs for us as we long to be in relationship with God.  We also need feminine imagery for God--God is also "Mother," but more on that subject later.