One of the first things I was taught about my faith, was that human beings were made in the image and likeness of God. I was a young child and had seen many paintings and pictures of Jesus, and since I was also taught that Jesus is God, I thought, then, that God looked just like us, only a lot more powerful.
Later, when I learned that God is also spirit, I remember being disappointed. I wanted someone I could feel, talk to, cry with. Someone like my father, my mother, my grandparents. They were not spirits. They were real.
And then came lessons about The Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. I puzzled over this mystery of our Faith. In my young mind, I reasoned that any father could be a son, and any son could be a father, and the spirit could be the thoughts I had about any one of them. And all that served me for a while, because I was a child. I did not really understand that my Catholic Faith was actually that–faith.
True faith is where one steps out in total trust. Though there may be times in which we don’t feel God near us, we step out regardless because of Faith.
In the realm of faith, we don’t need to understand the specifics of God because no one can truly understand Him. He is the first cause of being itself; the eternal, ultimate entity, as far above us in power and intellect and reasoning as we are above a grasshopper. Yet, what a grasshopper needs is provided for it through the balances in nature. Certainly God provides for us, His children.
Gradually, we use our memory, intellect, and will, to determine our image of God, and then through it, express our Faith, Hope, and Love with those same God-Given human faculties. We put on the ‘mind of Christ.’
For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he should instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ–1 Cor. 2:16
Then putting on the Mind of Christ:
We are not asked to develop a kind of spiritual amnesia—a blocking—out of everything painful. We are asked however to trust Him so our sins can be swallowed up in the ocean of His mercy. We are asked to develop a spirit of compassion so we can look at any person or incident in our past through His merciful Eyes. We are asked to transform our memory through the power of His grace, to sweep it clean of all cobwebs, dirt and superfluities that keep that faculty so cluttered up there is no room for God. –Mother Angelica
And finally, we come to the purpose of our Faith, and what God is really all about–Love.
There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience that in our lives – the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family. Find them. Love them.–Mother Theresa
All taking us back to our childhood and what we wanted God to be: Someone we can feel, talk to, cry with. Someone real.
Translating a World on the Edge 