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.