A True Look At God

In a kindergarten art session, the teacher asked a little girl what she was drawing. She answered that it was a picture of God. The teacher gently reminded the child that no one knows what God looks like. The moppet replied, “they will when I finish!”

As Voltaire opined, God has made us to his image, but we tend to make him into ours.*  We tend to impose our limitations on our concept of God. We expect him to love as little as we do, to forgive only what we would forgive.

Even great minds like that of Desiderius Erasmus struggled against that tendency to anthropomorphize God. In his lucid prose C.S. Lewis wrote, in The Problem of Pain, that “we regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.” *

My challenge in writing this is to loft the reader’s perception of God above such pedestrian and myopic views of our ineffable tender, loving, merciful Father. I hope to impress reader with the fact that for God, unlike us humans, offering forgiveness isn’t an occasional act; it’s a permanent attitude, a diving and eternal prerogative.

Scripture overflows with images expressing how God erases our sin: “I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud, and your sins like mist” (Isaiah 44:22). “He will tread our iniquities under foot” (Micah 7:19). “The blood of Jesus…cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). “I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more’ (Jeremiah 31:34).

The prolixity of scripture on the topic of God’s mercy is amazing; it would be difficult to find any other topic treated so extensively in God’s Word. That fact along with Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on the mercy of God, Dives in Misericordia, provides the best possible support for the authenticity of the relatively modern devotion to the mercy of God, promoted by the unprecedented impetus of Jesus’ revelations to Saint Faustina.

Jesus himself strives, by reliable revelation, public and private, to correct our absurdly distorted and harshly cropped view of his great attribute of Divine Mercy and compassion, which “is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9). His words to Sister Faustina are indicative of the depths of this attribute: “My mercy is so great that no mind, be it of man or of angel, will be able to fathom it throughout all eternity.”*  Even the far-beyond-human intellects of the highest of the nine choirs of angels, the seraphim and cherubim, with their profound insights that will grow ever deeper for all the endless ages of eternity, will never be able to comprehend the greatness of God’s attribute of Divine Mercy! Yet God entices us to try, at least, to fathom the fathomless. What better way to grow in knowing him and his love?

Before we “launch out into the deep,” we must assist our advancement by “weighing anchor.” It is appropriate for this treatise about God’s mercy to begin with a strong emphasis on the premiere purpose of God’s mercy – admittedly its negative aspect – namely, the disencumbering of the soul from its anchor, its sin-burden. We move on to the more “positive” aspects of his mercy such as the bestowal of graces, intercessory mercy by the “works of mercy,” spiritual gifts, health, food, sustenance, resources and more. “Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things” (Matthew 6:32).

The overview of both the negative and positive aspects is summarized in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which discloses that the Lord enables us to “receive mercy and find grace” (Hebrews 4:!6). That is, he erases the blemishes of sin (negative) and enriches our lives with myriad helps (positive).

I venture to suggest that the multiple dimensions of this breathtaking prerogative of the Almighty deserves no less a name than The Awesome Mercy of God.

*See www.quote-fox.com: “If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated.”

* C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, quoted at en.thinkexist.com

* Sister M. Faustina Kowalska, Diary of Sister M. Faustina Kowalska: Diving Mercy in My Soul, 3^rd ed. With revisions (Stockbridge MA: Marian, 2004). P. 699.

This excerpt is from the book The Awesome Mercy of God, by John H. Hampsch, C.M.F., originally published by Servant Books. It and other of Fr. Hampsch's books and audio/visual materials can be purchased from Claretian Teaching Ministry, 20610 Manhattan Pl, #120, Torrance, CA 90501-1863. Phone 1-310-782-6408.