Images of God and caricatures

This subject seems to have pursued me from Taize to Durham, via Surrey. There are a whole load of inter-related questions, like: how do we identify our images of God? How accurate are they? How might you suggest to someone that their image of God isn't very helpful? In Taize we were asked to think about our caricatures of God, which seemed a bit strange to start with, until we thought about what caricatures are - taking one aspect of something and making it the main feature. They contain a partial truth and partially reflect reality, but the emphasis is off. We all do it, I think, but sometimes those caricatures become limiting and unhelpful, or, probably worse, we think they're the whole of the picture and start imposing them on other people.

In a lecture here it was suggested that someone who has a negative image of God - e.g. that s/he is punitive, judgemental etc shouldn't be encouraged to 'open themselves' to God in prayer. In fact they should be encouraged to distance themselves from that God, and then there is an on-going process to help people reconfigure their image of God. We weren't told how... It makes sense though, although I got the feeling that some people were a bit doubtful about the suggestion that someone *shouldn't* be encouraged to pray... Suspect that bit didn't come across exactly how it was meant.

Image of prayer

At communion tonight the guy giving the sermon used an image that I want to record here so I don't forget it - but it's too late right now to do much thinking about it. He was talking about the first part of Colossians and interpreted it to say that Christians should have a different identity, a different outlook, and a different lifestyle. In the outlook section he described different ways of receiving gifts - there's the child-like so-excited-I just-have-to-rip-the-paper-off-and-ooh-look-someone-else-with-another-present kind of approach. But there's also the, probably just as excited but more reflective, way of opening gifts - taking time, shaking it, feeling it, gradually taking the paper off, and then finally standing and looking and appreciating the gift approach - a kind of experience of awe and wonder that someone has taken the time and effort to give this gift to *you*. And that second experience is very close to prayer....

Learning style and worship

We did a session today on learning style. I came out as strongly visual and fairly strongly kinaesthetic - so I need to look at things and move around a bit when learning? I'm sure there's a bit more to it than that... maybe we get on to it another time. But what was more interesting was a couple of throwaway comments that the facilitator made linking learning style with worship/church. I always knew that I have trouble listening to sermons - I'm not sure they sink in for many people, but for me they *really* don't make an impact. I'd learn much more if they just gave me the text of the sermon to read and then discuss. I had to fill out a sheet today about preaching, and one of the questions was 'what good sermons/preachers' have you heard. I discovered that I could remember approximately 2.7 sermons, which is a bit unfortunate considering that I must have listened to at least a million sermons (+/- one or two) in the last 20 years. I have however had many good worship experiences interrupted by a tedious sermon! This is doubly unfortunate since I'm going to be doing the preaching myself very soon...