Imagine to Remember

It is said that our earliest relationship with authority, our parents, become a proxy for how we come to see God. For me there was a shocking contradiction, a dual nature, I struggled to understand, to be terrified, yet cared for, to hide yet yearn for connection. Intimate but unknowable. Pushing and pulling. And so my relationship to God was fraught with the same complexes.I have worshipped a God of destruction who I feared may strike me down for my missteps, however big or small, and I worshipped purely for my own gain, the God of convenience who would get me out of trouble and grant my wishes. Pained by the world I prayed for peace on earth and was disappointed to awake and find it unchanged. I could relate only transactionally, I worshiped and expected to be paid in kind. My sin was in the narrowness of my vision, the smallness of my desire, being limited, petty, confined. I knew only a God, in my own image, or that of my mother, my father, the teacher, the state and this is the worst kind of projection but because we cannot gaze upon the divine face in this life, we are easily deluded, confusing our projections for reality.