God Slot: Prepare to become a ‘little one’

By Fr Declan Boland

Did you ever stop to think where we get our ideas about God? When we call God ‘Our Father,’ what does that image stir up in our minds? The truth is that we project onto God the experiences we have of our own fathers, mothers or authority figures.

If our experiences have been healthy and positive it is through that lens that we will see God.

But if we have had less than a positive experience we will see God precisely in that negative light.

It is very difficult for someone who has had an abusive, stern or even violent father to ever see God the Father as a loving God.

Early on we learnt how to please our parents. When we were good, they were pleased and we were rewarded.

When we misbehaved we were reprimanded and punished. When we were successful our parents were pleased, but not so when we failed or messed up.

Then of course we projected this onto God. He would love us when we were virtuous and well-behaved but would sulk and turn off his love when we were bad and sinful.

I think many of you reading this will identify fully with the above. In that regard I want to state very clearly two hugely important truths, which, if we fully accept, will change our ideas about God and the way we pray.

The first truth is that we can never earn God’s love, pure and simple.

It is always there flowing into us no matter what the circumstances. It will take us a lifetime to fully appreciate this as our Christian upbringing has told us the opposite. God will love you only if you are well behaved, virtuous and upright.

The truth is that we are fully loved even as we sin. This is not a recipe for indifference or abandoning all our efforts, but an invitation from God to admit our own weakness and powerlessness and to totally depend on his grace and mercy.

The miracle of God’s grace and our conversion do not lie within our own efforts.

We do our best but everything depends on the grace of God, and our own efforts have to fail again and again and again before we learn this truth.

Accepting our own weakness and inability to do anything without the grace of God, I now state the second truth which will startle many. It is this: It is not our virtue but our weaknesses that connect us with the grace of God, who did not come to call the virtuous but sinners to repentance.

No one can get to know his or her sin, without at the same time, getting to know God – not before or afterwards, but simultaneously in one and the same moment of spiritual insight.

Anyone who thinks he knows his sin apart from the encounter with God still lives in a state of illusion.

At the very moment that the sinner receives forgiveness and is caught up by God and restored to grace, at that moment – wonder of wonders – sin becomes the place where God enters into contact with a human being.

One may even go further and say there is no other way to encounter God and learn to know him than by the way of repentance. Before that God was only a word, a concept, a vague longing, the God of the philosophers, and poets but not the God who reveals himself in unfathomable love. For the Lord came to call sinners, stay with them and to eat with them, not with the righteous; he came to seek that which was lost. Thus God makes himself known by forgiving. And the sinner, by plumbing the depths of his sin, will discover the space of God’s mercy at the very moment that the one swallows up the other.

This moment of grace is the primary and most fundamental part of a real encounter with the gospel.

It is the experience of the ‘little ones,’ the poor in spirit, and especially of conspicuous sinners, women of the street and publicans, the people who precede others into the kingdom of God (Matt.21:31).

It is in them and in the likes of them that God decided to meet and save humankind. There is no other situation in which God so personally presents himself and brings salvation.

Without the gift of grace our efforts are not Christian at all but something else. He does not want what we call our virtues. He seeks our weakness so that his strength may grow in us with out any limit, as St Paul tells the Corinthians (2Cor:12:9).

For it is only in our weakness that the power of God comes into its own.