Finding our Middle – 40 Days with Anna

Day 23 – Monday after 4th Sunday of Lent 

To Read:

[Note:  here and later ‘bits of glass’ refers to the pieces of a kaleidoscope that Anna used to base her thoughts on]

Mister God most certainly enjoyed it, but then Mister God didn’t at all mind making himself small.  People thought that Mister God was very big and that’s where they made a big mistake.  Obviously Mister God could be any size he wanted to be.

‘If he couldn’t be little, how could he know what it’s like to be a ladybird?’  Indeed, how could he?  So, like Alice in Wonderland, Anna ate of the cake of imagination and altered her size to fit the occasion.  After all, Mister God did not have only one point of view but an infinity of viewing points, and the whole purpose of living was to be like Mister God.  So far as Anna was concerned, being good, being generous, being kind, praying, and all that kind of stuff had very little to do with Mister God.  They were, in the jargon of today, merely a ‘spin-off.  This sort of thing was just ‘playing it safe’, and Anna was going to have none of it. 

No!  Religion was all about being like Mister God and it was here that things could get a little tough.  The instructions weren’t to be good and kind and loving, etc., and it therefore followed that you would be more like Mister God. No!  The whole point of being alive was to be like Mister God and then you couldn’t help but be good and kind and loving, could you?

Now Mister God was a bit different from a flower.  A flower that didn’t want the yellow light was called yellow by us because that is what we saw.  You couldn’t say the same thing about Mister God.  Mister God wanted everything, so he didn’t reflect anything back!  Now if Mister God didn’t reflect anything back, we couldn’t possibly see him, could we?  So as far as we were concerned, so far as we were able to understand what Mister God was, we simply had to admit that Mister God was quite empty.  Not empty because there was truly nothing there, but empty because he accepted everything, because he wanted everything and did not reflect anything back!  

Of course you could cheat if you wanted to;  you could wear your bit of coloured glass marked ‘Mister God is loving’ or the bit marked ‘Mister God is kind’, but then, of course, you would miss the whole nature of Mister God.  Just imagine what kind of an ‘object’ Mister God must be if he accepts everything, if he reflects absolutely nothing back.  

This, said Anna, is being a REAL GOD.  This is what we were being asked to do, throw away our pieces of coloured glass and see clearly.

The fact that Old Nick was busy turning them out by the million made things a bit difficult at times but that was the way things were.

To Reflect:

As we go deeper into Anna’s understanding of Mister God we will find that she has an unwavering ability, once she has led us to one picture of God, she then turns it on its head!

I guess it’s because she is an expert at understanding that Mister God has many ‘points of view’ and so fits into whatever is needed to help us come closer.  Mister God’s love is bigger in a different way than anything we can understand but is also as small as needed.  After all  ‘If he couldn’t be little, how could he know what it’s like to be a ladybird?’  

And then she moves onto the deeper attributes of Mister God, which if we are not careful we can put them at the heart of our belief instead of realising that they are but spin-offsand seeking them intentionally can be seen as playing it safe.  She is expert at de-bunking arguments of False Equivalence and reminds us that if we are loving or kind and Mister God is loving or kind it does not mean that we are Mister God.  This is an ancient argument that Old Nick has been peddling since the very beginning

[The serpent] said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ ² The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, ³ but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die”’  ⁴ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die, ⁵ for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God…’ (Genesis 3v1-5)

To counter this Anna asks two things of us.  To throw away our bits of glass that only limit our horizons and make Mister God small in an unhelpful way.  She also invites us to empty ourselves so that we can get to the aim of our belief which is not to just do good things (that is the spin off) but to be like Mister God and so able to welcome everything.  

When that happens the spin offs don’t just happen on the good days when we feel particularly loving or kind but happen every day because they are who we are and we can’t help but produce the very things that draw us closer into the great big love of The One Who Loves us Best.

 

Please Note:  These reflections are also published on my blog: suffolkvicarhomes.com on Bluesky as @suffolkvicar.bsky.social, and on my public Facebook page  Suffolk Vicar – Rev Andrew Dotchin.  If you would like them as a daily email please send a request to revdotchin@gmail.com

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