1. Meditation
2. Song
I Speak Jesus
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PcmqSfr1ENY
3. Narrative
Below are Sr Christine Kresho’s notes on the summary of Sr. Joan Chittester’s thoughts on the images of God. Sr. Chris read these notes during the Spiritual Companion zoom Meeting held last Tuesday Oct 25, 2022 Thanks Sr Chris for generously sharing your notes to us.
….,,….,
Sr. Joan Chittester
as we talk about our God-image and the consequences of what we choose to believe but she was not always that way—-example of change
It’s not so much a question of belief in God—-Belief in God is not a terribly exceptional matter, “Every group of people, nation or tribe on earth, in fact, has come to the juncture where only God is an answer to questions for which there are no answers.” In fact, belief in God may be the least important fact in considering this matter of the image of God. “It is not the idea of God; it’s not belief in God or a higher power that sets us apart in the history of humanity,” . “It is the kind of God in which we choose to believe that in the end makes all the difference.”
Quote from J. Chittister:
let’s look at the image of God
defined over centuries by a celibate, all-male priestly culture, who
imagined God had bestowed on them remarkable, even super-human, powers. According to their understanding of God and what he had called them to, the difference between members of this all male priesthood and the rest of the world was no less than ontological, a difference in the nature of their very being. Youngsters were taught in Catholic schools that when priests were ordained they received an indelible mark on their souls and that, in relation to the rest of the community, they stood in the place of Christ himself, alone possessing the power to forgive sin and to make Christ fully present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. This was a mighty God indeed, in a well-ordered religious universe designed and overseen by men.
As Chittister also said, “Women don't question theological truths that have been defined without half the world's spiritual insights because men say that God does not want women to decide what God wants. They have made the all-spiritual God male—a very clever heresy—and so they have made themselves closer to God and made God hostage to sexism, and left a sacramental church without sacraments and, because it is their will, say it is God's will.”
Along the way she would discard “God the persecutor who created life in order to trap us in our own ignorance,” (I must have done something wrong—God is punishing me===friend who got sick in winter)
as well as “God the mighty male…to whom obedience, subservience, and deference were the only proper response .
She came to the conclusion “after a lifetime of looking for God” that she was looking in the wrong places, “that a divinity such as this is simply a graven image of ourselves, that such a deity is not a god big enough to believe in.”
could this be why so many question faith in God —that we have made God petty
returning the favor in Genesis—-“Let us make them in our image”
She had known, she said, “all of these gods in my own life: God the angry, The God in the Old Testament—the God we see when we misunderstand the stories of Jesus that end in being thrown into a place of fire and the gnashing of teeth— instead of asking the question could it be—— that we create our own hell by separating our selves from Community/refusing to accept God’s invitations
God the indifferent and remote, the God we keep UP in heaven—the God who needs indulgences; penances
God the magician, Santa-God
God the implacable judge, who punishes —venial & mortal sins— need for Confession not that we don’tbut different than what we do now
Mass obligation instead of a response to an invitation—no wonder we asked what Mass did for us rather than think about our relationship—going to Mass because of Community and to have supper with a friend
God the tease,” quid pro quo who disappoints us
adding that “all of those gods have failed me. I learned that law-keeping did not satisfy my need for meaning…I learned that fear of wrath did not seduce me to love. I learned that God the distant doer of unpredictable and arbitrary magic failed to engage my soul, let alone enlighten it. I learned that life was surely about far more important things than walking around in a darkened funhouse, sometimes bumping into the God who does good things, and sometimes the God who does bad.”
She had used all of those gods and more at different times in her life, often as a shield to protect herself from life's unpleasantness. “As a result, I failed often to take steps to change life either for myself or, worse, perhaps for all those others on my television screen, on my block, in my club, when injustice masked itself as God's will for them and oppression as God's judgment on them.” God was always “out there,” said Chittister, and thus she became “blind to the God within me.” The irony in that ever-increasing crowd of godly images was that they ultimately “blocked the image of the presence of God in life” for her. Worse, they actually “made a mockery of the very definition of God, the fullness of being, the one who, having created us, wills us well and not woe, good and not grief, and all of us fullness of life, not some of us inert and invisible nothings.” If, as she contends, “we grow in the image of God we make for ourselves,” she is proof herself that our notions of God can change radically,
Chittister's evolution in thinking about God springs in part from the context of contemporary Christianity,
where there seems, as Sr. Elizabeth Johnson notes, something in the air of this era that is generating new searches for God. Your presence here week after week, the multi-faith retreat I made in August, pope Francis and the synod; Future Church— all these indicate the search remains quite alive in the early twenty-first century, particularly among women.
Struggles to understand God in new ways, Johnson writes, have arisen out of such disparate forces as efforts to understand the evil of the Holocaust; the struggles for social justice; concern for women's issues; involvement in facing environmental challenges; and “from Christianity's encounter with goodness and truth in the world's religious traditions.”
Chittester would also add: “feminism that came to crumble, wash away, and replace a God made small by puny ideas cast in puny images.”
If an inadequate God of small ideas and limited imagination is rejected, what God of big ideas might we substitute? If God is not to be pursued or coveted, can't be won like some spiritual trophy to be possessed, placed on the shelf and glanced at should doubts arise; that one need not keep a continuous ledger to determine whether one is on this or that side of God's favor—that God's love is unearnable and as impossible to possess as the wind itself—one can stop trying to fashion the God of previous expectations and limits. What we are doing; and what we need to do is to look for that God who was light.”
Then we learn and recognize a God without a face of any color or gender, a God who did, indeed, come in fire and light, God with us, Emmanuel, but unseen, God with us but hidden in the obvious. The God I knew lived in the light and was the light.
“Whenever God was shrunk to meet someone's then-current need to control or frighten or cajole…Whenever God the theological Santa Claus didn't give me what I wanted and God the judge let evil go by unchallenged, I knew down deep that God, the God I had experienced, was bigger than that. You can't trap light. You can't box it, buy it, earn it, or be sure of it. I was never able to stop feeling the undiminished light
with echoes of Teilhard de Chardin's insights into we come to know that “The God of design and plans becomes the God of evolution and the working out of creation with us as we go.” It is hardly surprising that the work of the visionary French Jesuit should echo loudly through the speculation of women imagining aspects of God previously unrecognized by men charged with determining the nature of the deity for the Catholic community. Teilhard inspired a new universe of thinking about the nature of God
What are the things that are pushing you to believe in a different God?
4. Prayer (excuse the outrageousness of this prayer from the movie Talladega Nights. The link below explains the theology behind it)
Dear Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Infant Jesus, don't even know a word yet, just a little infant, so cuddly, but still omnipotent. We just thank you for all the races I've won and the $21.2 million dollars... LOVE THAT MONEY that I have accrued over this past season.
5. Meditation
6. Song
Lord you are beautiful
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Np_hHc2KrhA
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