TRUST IN GOD’S GOODNESS
I’m more and more convinced that many of those who call themselves atheists are men and women who, when they reject God, are really rejecting a «mental idol» that they’ve fabricated when they were children. The idea of God that they carry within and with which they’ve lived for some years has ended up small. There came the time when that God resulted for them a being so strange, inconvenient, and bothersome that they’ve gotten rid of it.
It’s not hard for me to understand these persons. Dialoguing with some of them I recalled more than once certain words of the patriarch Maximos IV during the Council: «Nor do I believe in the god in which the atheists don’t believe». In reality, the god that some have suppressed in their lives is a caricature that they’ve falsely formed of him. If they’ve emptied their soul of that «false god», isn’t it so that they can make room some day for the true God?
But how can someone today encounter God? If they draw near to those who call themselves believers, it easily could happen that they’ll find us praying, not to the true God, but to a small idol upon which we project our interests, fears, and obsessions. A God whom we pretend to make our own and whom we try to use for our benefit, forgetting God’s immense and unfathomable goodness for everyone.
Jesus breaks through all our schemes when he presents us in the parable of the «lord of the vineyard» with that God who «gives everyone their denarius», whether they earned it or not, and says thus to those who protest: «Are you going to be jealous because I’m generous?»
God is good with all, whether we deserve it or not, whether we’re believers or atheists. God’s mysterious goodness is way beyond the faith of believers and beyond the unbelief of the atheists.
What we must do is forget our schemes, keep silent within, listen deep within to the life that beats in us… and wait, trust, let our being be open. God doesn’t indefinitely hide Self from one who seeks God with a sincere heart.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
