The changing faces of God

I don’t usually think much of it, but whenever I meet someone for the first time, I am born again. There’s something special that happens every time our minds put a face and a name together—a unique persona is created from the dust of the unknown. So while I may think that I’m still the same person as before, it’s not necessarily the case—in the mind of the other person, I am reshaped into an image of his or her making. In this way, I am a different person to different people.

Psychologist William James stated that an individual person consists of as many different “selves” as there are people who recognize him or her. To him, the concept of one’s “self” is anchored not so much to our personal thoughts and memories as we may think, but rather to our relationships. We are, for better or for worse, known by how others perceive us.

This is one reason why our bonds with our parents remain particularly significant throughout our lives. For many of us, they were the first people with whom we ever made contact. At the moment of our birth, our existence is empty, suspended in a lonely liminal space. Only when we are lifted into the embrace of our parents are we validated with unique membership in this world. We become someone else’s daughter or son—our identity is consecrated only when we know we are precious to those around us.

In any relationship, there exists a dynamic equilibrium between intimacy and mystery. As children, we naturally want to know everything about our parents and all the important conversations they seem to be having. But when we discover too much, when the mystery shatters, we realize that they are in fact imperfect human beings, just like we are.

It becomes our first fall from innocence. As John Steinbeck writes in “East of Eden,” “When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone… And the child’s world is never quite whole again.” We can no longer trust our parents wholeheartedly with the childlike faith we once had because we know that they and the world around us are flawed.

Sometimes I like to compare the progression of Western history to the development of an individual person’s life. In both narratives, there are times when God is seen as an intimate Father and other times as a distant Judge, depending on the stage of growth. In the late Middle Ages, God’s presence seemed almost tangible, as in childhood, with manifestations of his glorious miracles revealing themselves to saints and walking with devout followers during their pilgrimages across the continent. When the emergence of cities gave rise to growing scholastic cultures focused on philosophy and higher learning, God became seen as a schoolteacher, with the world as His school, a place full of curiosity, contemplation and discovery. Then came the Black Death, a mysterious plague that damaged the people’s trust in the Father they thought they knew—if God was so benevolent, then how could he so arbitrarily bring mass destruction?

After the Middle Ages, the Word seemed to gradually become Flesh, as God was brought down more and more to the level of humanity. The Renaissance and Reformation stressed the glory of humanity and strengthened the intimacy between God and man by removing the Church as a spiritual intermediary. Yet, the dawn of Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism led people to see God in a more deistic sense, as a rational but detached Creator figure. Subsequently, the rise of modernity saw God’s stature shrink as the status of mankind soared—if modern technology could allow man to compress even time and space, how soon until he could reach the heavens as well?