A few years ago, I asked subscribers if they’d be interested in a digital retreat. At that time, interest did not seem to warrant the work involved. However, now that my Facebook group Authentic Contemplative Prayer has over 13,000 members, I decided the time was right. Instead of a retreat, I chose to create a course that you can watch on your own time.
For more information on the course and to sign up, click or tap here.
Please share this opportunity with your friends and family. I look forward to getting to know you better as we interact throughout the course.
Connie Rossini
Our idea of God is what keeps God away. Salvation requires that we give up the idea we have of God because God is not an idea. For example the idea that God is my God. “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.”
The teachings of the Church are necessary starting points for intimacy with God. What we personally expect of God based on those teachings is probably somewhat skewed by our experience, lack of faith, and lack of maturity. The latter is what needs to be refined.Well, there is truth in what you said, but we have to be really careful here. Our idea of God is not God Himself. That is true. Yet, what the Church teaches us about God is the truth, and we cannot expect to grow close to Him if we set those truths aside. When Jesus said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, he wasn’t expressing some mistaken idea about who God is. He was quoting the Psalms and also voicing His experience of abandonment because He was bearing our sins. It is not in any way wrong to call God “my God,” unless by that term you somehow mean that He is under your control. God gave us an intellect so that we would use it to discover the truth. That intellect is limited, because we are creatures. It can only get us so far. After that, God must reveal Himself to us in a supernatural manner. Our idea of God continues to mature and deepen as we grow in knowledge and especially in love of Him. We are like children, whose idea of the sun is that it makes the world warm and light. That is true, but it is a very limited understanding of what the sun is. It does not become less true as we learn scientific facts about the sun. Another example. I met my husband through Single Catholics Online. The first things I knew about him were what he had written in his profile in answer to a series of questions. His answers are still true, but I don’t think of them very often, because now I know the man himself, who is so much more than answers to a dozen questions! Those answers were never barriers to my getting to know him, but I did have some wrong expectations based on my interpretations of those answers, which I interpreted in the context of my life experience to that point. I had to be willing to recognize the deficiencies in my expectations and accept my husband for who he was. The doctrines of the Church are necessary as a starting point for getting to know God. But we interpret them to a certain extent based on our experience, and then we expect God to be something He is not. It is the interpretations we wrongly make, not the doctrines, that we must learn to let go of.