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Addressing God

Only a few days ago I had a rather interesting talk with the members of one of our discussion groups about how we address God - what we call him when we pray. For me, as for others (many others?) this is all rather fraught. And that’s because too many of the names and titles of God have got extra baggage attached to them from our own individual pasts.

Let me give you an example. A great friend of our family once told me she could only pray to Jesus, never to ’God’ or ’the Father.’ Why? Because her own father had made her early life miserable with mental and verbal abuse. After that, it just wasn’t possible to pretend that a word like ’Father’ didn’t have overtones which made any positive use of it impossible for her.

Like the family friend I too have difficulty with words for God. But unlike her I have a problem with the the word ’Jesus’ itself. My Sunday School convinced me at an early age that he was judgmental and vindictive, given to favouritism and always vacillating between a rather nauseating sweetness and a sudden inexplicable wrath. And as well as that, I heard the word used more often as an expression of anger than anything else. It wasn’t until I discovered, as a teenager, the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus that I began to feel (as opposed to merely know) that the real Jesus was rather different. And strangely enough (the originally mediaeval) devotion to the Sacred Heart really took off in seventeenth century France exactly as an antidote to the then current fashion of a harsh and judgmental Jesus.

Do you have similar difficulties, I wonder? Sometimes it’s necessary to put a little thought into outwitting our religious neuroses. One of the most remarkable examples I know is the practice of praying to the Child Jesus, a devotion which many including the great St Teresa have found very helpful. Indeed, there is a wonderful shrine in the Carmelite Church in Prague to the Child Jesus which I have visited more than once, and which has about it an atmosphere of prayer and holiness which you could cut with a knife - even if praying to Jesus as a child is not your thing any more than it is mine.

The most obvious way to deal with any problems in this area is to use words and terms other than those that push your buttons. You might like to think of God as the Merciful One (and actually speak to him as such) rather than as the Almighty Father. You will find many places where the New Testament writers like Paul and James list various desirable qualities. Just try (as they would) attributing these to God and you will see what a difference it can make. Try James 3:17 for example. Here he is talking about ’the wisdom from above’ which is God himself, of course. So - with a little editing - we get ’God is pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.’ I don’t imagine too many neuroses could get upset with that!