face of God

No matter how much you tell a child, “Dont worry, when your parents die, they will go to God/heaven and you will see them again and live with them forever!”, it doesn’t quite cut it. It doesn’t lessen his dread of ‘losing’ his loved ones because in the mind of the child (and adult children not in the safety of truth), there is the father, there is the mother and then there is God. What the child loves about the father are all the things that are, well, about the father. Same for the mother. What makes the mother, a mother – her humanity, her life, her compassion, her special love for the child, her acceptance of the child’s love, her appreciation of the child, her support and forgiveness, her happiness in his sucess, her attention for him and so on – is what is lovable about the mother. A child sees these unique beings as distinct from the God who created them…the child can be told that this God is also loving and caring and living and sustaining but to the child, this God is all these things in a way that he has never seen, he has never experienced God as living, God as caring and so on. wish as he may, try as he may, his trust and confidence in the existence of such unknown and unseen compassion and life are weak. He may bolster this confidence by proclaiming with ever greater intensity that he believes in the livin and loving God, he may join an elite club that is focused on doing this and also spreading this message to others and converting them to this idea..but in his heart, he has no trust and no evidence. the child knows the difference between what is actually true and what he simply wishes to be true…adult children also know the difference.

It is only with a revealed claim that says “the life and lovce of your father and your mother are not your father’s and mother’s property…they are the love and life of your God..that love, that life that you experience and see in them, they can have it because a living one and a loving One gives these to them…all love and all life is in the Name of the Living and the Loving…everything is what it is and how it is in the Name of the One to whom all things belong and therefore also all praise and adoration for those things goes to Him..revelation asks the child to attribute all instances of life and love to the One. this One as a God is One whose love and life the child can see, touch, observe..be sure of to the extent that his heart and mind are made able to attain certainty and surety…

my task is to see that which i already see without seeing God, in the Name of God so that i see the face of God there. where i previously saw the love of my mother, the compassion of my mother (for others and for herself..her desire for happiness etc), i now see her God and my God who loves me and wants happiness for her. without seeing the face of God, God is a word that refers to nothing that i can know. and losing what i love and know to someone i do not know is no consolation at all..