My Introduction to God
Getting to Know God, Part 1
[N. B. This post originally appeared on a blog called “Learning God,” which is now archived on The Compleat Catholic Reader Substack under the Get God category.]
THERE IS knowing about God (intellectual) and then there is knowing God (experiential). Learning God will be mostly about the latter, and particularly about knowing God through prayer. I had intended to call this blog “Knowing God,” but that seemed rather presumptuous. None of us, this side of the grave, will be able to do more than to keep getting to know God a little better all the time; in Eternity, we shall truly know Him just as we are known by Him now, for then “we shall see Him as He is.” Until then, we just keep learning. So, I’m calling this undertaking “Learning God.”
To get started, I’d like to mention a few things about myself and the way I first became acquainted with God. One of the things I want to talk about is the way we recognize God operating in our lives, a story we need to be able to read with understanding. (On The Compleat Catholic Reader, I discuss the way we can find God in other kinds of stories.) I also want to talk about some of the great works of spiritual literature, particularly those that have been a part of my personal story.
Let me say up front that I do not claim to be a credentialed expert in prayer—I have no certifications or formal training to teach about the life of prayer or to give spiritual direction. However, I have spent most of my life (the better part of the past fifty years or so) getting to know God through prayer and action, as well as learning from others more expert than myself. I guess you could say I have spent (and will continue to spend) my earthly life learning God, one way or another.
Knowing God through His Action in Our Lives
One of the things I discuss a lot, whether I’m writing about literature or the Bible or about the art of writing itself, is the power of stories to teach us in a way that is illuminative and illustrative rather than didactically instructional. What I am trying to do here on this Substack blog is to show others that becoming “compleat Catholic readers” can also help us live more completely Christian lives; but to do that, we need to become familiar with the great stories of our culture, the story of the Bible, the stories of the saints, and learn to read these stories with a depth of understanding that escapes most readers. When we learn to recognize patterns, themes, and levels of meaning, we see more clearly that the most important aspects of life are not found on its surface.
As a kind of spiritual exercise, I have found it useful, from time to time, to look back over my life and to see in it a story that God has been writing. Like most people, I have had, for most of my life, the bad habit of thinking that I am the author of my own life — that I am writing my own story. Adam and Eve made a similar mistake; as soon as they disobeyed God, they relegated Him to being a character in a story that they thought they could write for themselves, and immediately they learned what a big mistake that was. Thrown out of Paradise to struggle on their own, too late they saw how hard it is to try to be your own Author.
We all make this mistake, I believe, thinking of God as just one character (although perhaps an important one) in the story of our lives. Some may even try to write Him out of the story altogether. I have come to see that, in the very moments and choices in which I thought myself most assuredly the author of my own life, I have actually been doing a bad edit of the story that God has been writing. Fortunately, for most of that time, I have not deliberately been trying to subvert the plot He has in mind for me. I’ve begun to learn that He is a Master storyteller and, as any decent editor knows, the best way to edit a great writer is not to get in the way of the story he is trying to tell.
At any rate, I want to tell a bit of my story, partly because it helps me understand it better and partly because it may encourage you to look back over your own life and look for the God’s handwriting. To emphasize (for both of us) that I am not the author, I will tell this story in the third person, as if I were an observer rather than a participant. If you try this, you’ll find that it’s a good way to gain a degree of detachment from episodes that may otherwise be so emotionally fraught that’s it’s hard to see things from a God’s-eye-view.
Little Lisa’s Introduction to God
FOR LITTLE LISA, learning anything about God was not easy at first. She grew up in what her mother preferred to describe as an “agnostic” household, meaning that they weren’t atheists, but they didn’t go to church. Perhaps “heathen” might have been a more accurate term, at least for Lisa and her siblings, because they knew so little about God that there was not much to believe or disbelieve. Although they were a decent heathen family, growing up in the South at a time when it was rare (in fact, downright shameful) to be un-churched made often made things uncomfortable on a social level.
Little Lisa’s father never had the slightest interest in religion and would have been surprised if anyone had suggested that he should be the spiritual leader of the household. He was happy to let his wife handle anything to do with domestic order, and that included church-going (or not). One day, little Lisa asked her mother why the family never went to church the way other people did, and her mother shut down the conversation by saying simply, "We don't do that." The unspoken message was, “No more questions, and don’t ask again.” Later our young protagonist found out that, when she was very small, her mother had attended a revival at a local Baptist church, after hearing that the revivalist was a wonderful preacher. But it turned out that he was a preacher of the “fire and brimstone” sort, who clashed badly with Mother’s own belief that God is non-judgmental. Scorched by his fiery preaching, Mother forswore churchgoing, for herself and her family. Nonetheless, she occasionally permitted one or another of her children to attend church when invited by neighbors, as happened from time to time. But only once—or at most, twice. Any more than that and they would risk being “indoctrinated,” which would be a very bad thing. As long as church-going was just a social event, it was safe, but it wasn’t something safe to let get it their little heads.
Although Lisa’s family did not attend church or discuss God, they did have a Bible. It was a keepsake from her mother's childhood. Mother’s family were not churchgoers themselves, but when she was thirteen Mother had started singing in the choir at her best friend’s Lutheran church, and she may also have attended confirmation classes (although she had never been baptized). Since no one suspected that she had no intention of being confirmed, she was given a Bible along with all the other children in the class. It was a red-letter King James edition, white, with a soft leatherette cover that had a zipper around the edge, a nice keepsake of happy childhood memories but nothing more. Many years later, her daughter, little Lisa, became interested in this keepsake when she noticed it in its customary position on the lower shelf of an end table in the living room, zipped shut. Sometimes, when her mother asked her to dust the living room, she would unzip the Bible, finger the soft, gilt-edged pages and look at the luridly-colored pictures of people in strange robes. When she was a bit older and knew how to read, she would sometimes try to read a bit of it, but the odd names and the old-fashioned English confounded her efforts.
Primary Lessons
When she was about six years old, some Baptist neighbors invited Lisa and her brothers to attend Vacation Bible school with their boys. With a fourth baby at home, Mother welcomed this opportunity to get a week’s free child care, so off they went. Lisa never quite understood the stories that were illustrated by flannel-board figures (men and women who wore long, shapeless robes, like the illustrations in her mother’s Bible), but she appreciated the excellent snacks provided (Nehi sodas in every flavor!) and she enjoyed learning the songs, such as “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world” and “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” There was no fire or brimstone at the Vacation Bible School, you see. Sweet little songs were sufficient to impart an indelible lesson: Jesus loves me. Lisa thought He sounded like someone she would like to get to know.
She got a chance to learn a little more about this Jesus person a few months later. Having just started first grade, Lisa and her brothers got to know some other neighbors, a Catholic family who lived across the street. The eldest girl, Donna, was Lisa’s age and had also just started school. Donna was burbling over with things to tell her new neighbor and Lisa listened with bemusement to Donna’s description of her teachers, who were all unmarried ladies (“nuns”) who wore long, dark dresses that covered everything except their faces and hands, and who ndedicated their lives to teaching children — not just about reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also about God, about sin and the black marks it leaves on the soul; about repentance and forgiveness, and how these erase the black marks. It didn’t make a lot of sense to little Lisa, but it was interesting and memorable.
However, what Lisa would remember most vividly about that day was the tour Donna gave her of their house. A big family Bible sat open on the coffee table in the living room with a long list of Donna’s Catholic family tree, and a picture in the hallway of her home depicted a long-haired man (whom Donna identified as Jesus) praying at night in a garden. To Lisa’s surprise, Donna even took her into her parents’ bedroom where her mother kept a beautiful string of beads called a “rosary,” although it wasn’t apparent what it had to do with roses. A crucifix also hung in her parents’ bedroom — Jesus again, but nailed to a cross. Donna told Lisa that Jesus was a man, but also God. She didn’t quite exactly how that worked, but so many facts of life were a mystery to her that she was willing to believe without understanding. However, when she returned home and told her mother that Donna’s family had a picture of God, Mother said that she must be mistaken, because God is invisible and no one knows what He looks like. But Little Lisa was no longer confident that Mother knew best.
Sin, redemption. Jesus, God, and love. They were all connected somehow, but it would be years before I would figure out how, because my family remained allergic to religion, and my continuing brushes with the Protestant faith (Methodist, Church of Christ, Presbyterian) did little to enlighten me. So, for what seems like a long time, I had to be content with knowing this about God: Jesus is God and He loves me. Little did I realize that this is the essence of the Christian faith.