Reflection
Besides challenging his listeners to consider who they were, Jesus urged them to consider who God was. Every story Jesus told revealed something of the Holy, the reality he called “Father” the image that itself is a metaphor for what theologian Karl Rahner called ” Incomprehensible, Holy Mystery” – an ultimate reality beyond any box we try to put “God’ in.
Radical Amazement
Prayer
God beyond all names, all creation sings your glory.
Action
What is your image of God? In what is this image based? Does it limit God’s “Incomprehensible Holy Mystery”?
Suggested Reading
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples. He said to them, “When you pray, say: ‘Father, hallowed be your name…”
Luke 11: 1-2
Because we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not, we cannot consider how He is but only how He is not.
Thomas Aquinas
God is not a being among other beings, but the infinite Whither that makes possible the very functioning of our human spirit.
Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ
God is beyond existence and essence.
Paul Tillich
God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my (pick) shovel, my paint brush, my (sewing) needle – and my heart and thoughts.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.
Richard Rohr
No matter how entrenched in the imagination of the average Christian the image of a male God might be, theological tradition has never assigned sex to God.
Sandra Marie Schneiders
This most beautiful system (the Universe) could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.
Isaac Newton
They say that God is everywhere and yet we always think of Him as sort of a recluse.
Emily Dickinson
Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
Abraham Lincoln