Familiarity is the deadliest religious disease.
We feel at home with the familiar, because the familiar does not make any demand on us. It excludes the need to think. Thinking has the potential to unsettle us in our settled ways.
It is when the unfamiliar hits us that, thank God, our brain begins to tick!
So, it is good, as Jesus said, that hard days come. Blessed are you when you get into trouble. Adversity, wrote Francis Bacon, is the blessing of the New Testament.
We have been told from our birth onwards that we are created in the image and likeness of God. We are so pleased with this nice-sounding statement that we never wonder what it means. So, it means nothing to us.
In reality, it is of fundamental importance, because it address the question of our very identity!
Let’s consider… If we are created in the image and likeness of God….then what?
It could mean two things:
- We can understand ourselves, if we can understand God,
and
- we can understand God, if we can understand ourselves.
What if we understand neither?
We never ask this.
Why? Could it be because, when we should be looking at human beings, we are busy looking at God – while, when we should be minding God, we are busy minding everything else?
Are we not born experts at playing hide and seek?
None of us bothers to come to terms with who we are, or what our predicament is, because we assume that ‘God will take care of us’. Or, His grace is sufficient for us.
Equally, we make no effort to engage with the mystery that God is, just because we assume that God must be like us:
-Like us, God is ignorant and half-blind; so we have to inform and instruct him through our prayers.
-Like us, God is vain and vulnerable to flattery; so we include plenty of it in our worship.
-Like us, God is biased and indifferent to truth and justice; so we assume that God has to be partisan to our ways and interests and hostile to all the rest.
-We are limited in our love. We love only those who favour us and serve our interests. We assume God to do likewise.
-We love to work through agents and middlemen. Even at home, if there are two or three siblings, requests for favours are sent to the parents through the son/daughter who is assumed to be the parental favourite. We too approach God through his favourites.
It is not part of our religious training to seek the will of God with an open, unbiased mind.
We are trained to seek in God, about God, only what it is profitable and convenient for ourselves, our churches and their keepers.
So, we understand God in the image of our churches.
And churches, in turn, project themselves in the image of the God they create in their own images.
Can God exist without churches? Our answer is NO! Why? Because we believe that God is created by our church, even if we don’t state this.
We think that churches are the lights of the world.
No wonder there is still so much darkness in the world!
Let me summarise: Churches as well as success and prosperity tend to cocoon us from needing to face the realities about ourselves and about God. Of course, we can, even if we are successful and comfortable, exert ourselves to explore the realities of God and of ourselves. Otherwise, certainly, we can use the adversities that God allows us to experience, to encourage us to understand ourselves and God in a fresh way. Only then can we become more like God, as He intends us to do. And only then can we grow in the light, and become the lights in the world that God intends us to be.
