Kendall is an educator in the public schools, is almost finished with seminary, and is an avid lover of books, nature, and long walks. She is easily distracted by thunderstorms and loves a good conversation over coffee.
As I sit in my yellow chair and gaze out my window, I notice the wind whipping the branches in the trees.
If you are literate (which I’m assuming you are), you probably have a picture forming in your mind as you read the words above. It is likely based on your house, your window, or maybe the type of tree you have in your yard. If you’ve been to my house, then you have a fairly accurate picture of what I am describing. Otherwise, your brain formed a picture in your mind, based on the symbols that are on the screen. These symbols represent ideas. This process is known as reading. You read the words I wrote, and they formed a picture in your mind, based partially on what you know and have seen.
This, in the education world, is known as the science of reading. Experts in this field now know that for reading to take place, the brain has to activate four different areas to move from hearing or articulating a word, to making meaning and ultimately, recognizing visual patterns that associate a word (visual representation) with meaning and sound. Sound confusing? It is quite a process!
I bet you didn’t open this link to learn how we learn to read, did you? Well, to be honest, that’s really not the point of this blog post, either. But I think it will help us to make a connection.
First, a story. One of the words that all three of my kids learned first was “dog”. They heard us use the word even in utero. Once they were born and could focus their eyes on an object, they began to associate the word (sound) “dog” with the physical animal itself. They learned that it says “woof”. And every time we’d go for a walk, we’d see dogs. It makes sense that “dog” was one of their first words.
Once they grew to be 4 or 5, they began to realize that the letters D O and G combined to represent this word. They could write it, and therefore, communicate to us in print! Also popular with preschoolers? L O V E, M O M, and D A D. It’s so exciting to communicate in written form! We call this written form “words”.
If you take those same symbols “D O G” and reverse them, we get the word “G O D”. Put it together, and we have “God”. WHEW! I bet your brain just did some heavy lifting there! If you’re like me, seeing those symbols smushed together into one word also triggered some somatic responses. My brain reads the symbols, it creates meaning, and then connects to other parts of my body. Did you experience that, too?
(Did your pulse quicken? Did your stomach drop a bit? Did you create a picture in your mind? Did your heart rate speed up?)
These three innocuous letters, when put in a specific order, connect us to something much larger. This word immediately connects us to a picture and feeling.
Back to my first example: you have likely never been to my house. You don’t know what yellow chair I’m talking about, nor where it sits in relation to my windows. You don’t know where the trees are in my yard, what type they are, whether they still have leaves or are bare branches. But your brain was able to create a picture based on your experiences and what you know. Brains are good like that.
I’m guessing that when you read the word GOD, your brain did a similar thing. Faster than you can even imagine, your brain recognized the words, created a picture in your mind, assigned meaning, and triggered a reaction in your body appropriate to that meaning. It was much less threatening when I wrote DOG, wasn’t it?
Our brains create mental pictures based on what we read and hear. It’s inevitable.
I bet you have a mental picture of the word “GOD”, don’t you? Who, or what, do you imagine when you read those letters? An angry judge? A man floating on a cloud in the sky? Does your God look like the images of Greek or Roman gods you’ve read about or seen in movies? Does your GOD look like Morgan Freeman?
My point is not to correct the picture in your mind. (My picture is wrong, too!)
If God is Spirit, that makes it even more challenging to visualize who God is, because we don’t even get to imagine a form. God is so other to our experience that words can’t even contain God’s essence! The words that we form to represent the Creator of the Universe, the Light of the World, the Lover of our Souls, Ultimate Reality, and so on…fall short. G O D, those three letters, can’t begin to contain the fullness of who God actually is.
Richard Rohr once wrote, “All mature spirituality in one sense or another is about letting go and unlearning.”
I wonder if this might be true as we consider our mental images of God.
Who we picture God to be isn’t the fullness of God.
Our mental images of God are at best only a tiny piece of God’s fullness.
Our words can’t possibly capture the character of a Being Who is Ultimate Reality.
But, words and pictures are what we have. God is love, although our pictures of love may be deficient. God is beautiful. A walk in the woods demonstrates the beauty of God, if we are awake to that. God is good. We can trust God because God is always faithful. But this isn’t simply a cognitive exercise. This forms as a result of decades of seeing God’s goodness and faithfulness and beginning to believe it.
Our mental images of God definitely fall short of Who God Is. Part of the process of unlearning is to peel away the parts of this image that are faulty. Our mental images make God to be too small. (It’s inevitable! Our human minds can’t comprehend the Beauty and Fullness of God.) Making space for a God who is beyond our understanding is '“letting go and unlearning”. Recognizing that the God of Universe can’t be contained in the letters G O D pushes us to confront our too small images of who God might be what God is capable of.
May we continue to unlearn that which makes God too small and be open to the mystery of a God who is far better than our words could ever capture.