How well do we know and describe God? Individuals sometimes express frustration at the imperfections of how faith traditions talk about God (sometimes, people view religion negatively as a result). It was pointed out to me that our human attempts to communicate about God “merely reflect our human efforts that hint around various aspects of the contours of who God is.” Our communication about God is partial and imperfect and should be recognized as our limited human efforts to know the divine – an effort to appreciate for what we do learn rather than an imperfection to criticize.
This idea of the scope of our incomplete perceptions hit home – from a surprising perspective – while visiting with my mother on Christmas day. Parents and children think that they know one another. Children of blind parents think they have a close grasp of their parents’ experience. Blind parents – like all parents – think that they know their own children. Hmmm….. My mother knew that I had blonde hair when I was a young child (I was born blonde)….. Well, fast forward to the present day….. When I showed up at my mother’s house this November for the Thanksgiving holiday, I chose not to tell her that I’d had my hair cut short after having long hair for many years (I hadn’t fully made peace with my new hair style). My mother learned of my haircut when one of my siblings commented on my haircut (a few years ago, my mother found out about that sibling’s tattoo when I commented on the tattoo!). Later that Thanksgiving evening (after I’d gone home), my sibling told my mother “that Kim’s hair looks darker now that it’s short” – my sibling suggested that I had perhaps dyed my hair….. A month later, on Christmas Day, my mother asked if I had dyed my hair when I got it cut this summer. ”No,” I said, “My hair is naturally brown. When my hair is longer, the summer sun has time to bleach some of the longer strands to blonde. Now that it’s short, all that’s visible is my hair’s natural brown color. (awkward pause…..) ”Hmmm, my hair has been brown since early childhood…..” This generated an awkward moment – my mother was puzzled, I was surprised. I realized later (while driving home) that when I was ages four and five, when my hair naturally changed from blonde to brown, no one thought to tell my mother that the color of my hair had changed. Her parents, her grandparents, her siblings, my father, her friends – no one told her that her oldest child’s hair had changed from blonde to brown (it also didn’t occur to me as a child to tell my mother that the color of my hair had changed). I’ve now had naturally brown hair (with streaks of summer blonde) for most of my life; my mother thought for all these years that her daughter was still blonde! It came as a shock for my mother to find out that she’d been uninformed all these years about such a basic thing as the color of her her child’s hair; it came as a shock to me to find out that my own mother has thought all these years that I’m still blonde!
Transfer this Christmas Day conversation to our human efforts to know – and to communicate about – the nature of God. Ultimately, we humans are going to know as much about God as God reveals to us – finite amounts. We communicate about God to the degree that we know about God. What matters most regarding our knowledge of God is to know that God loves us and that God wants us to love both God and each other. We don’t need to fully understand God to positively live lives of faith.
Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a “Content Creator/Individual” member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog post, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).
