Our understanding of God is superficial. We are lightweights in our understanding of God. Our understanding of God has no depth . Our God is a face without details . His features are indistinct - blurred. Jesus deposited the apocalyptic details about God into the violent collision between Jesus and the evil that we did to him that took place on the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection. Who is responsible for erasing them? Blame our Church. In its presentation of God, the Church has castrated the pizzazz of Christianity from the body of Christ. It has snipped it off at the root. It has deprived the children of Adam and Eve of the magic of Christianty that enchants them and has substituted for it a dull, perfunctory routine. The God that the Church presents to us is one-dimensional, colorless, and insipid . Our Church has downplayed the pizzazz of God that causes the children of Adam and Eve to exclaim, 'Wow!'. The clerics of our Church are prodigies who can recite an encyclopedia of sins but cannot share with us any significant details about our God. It is as if our clerics do not know him. For instance, our clerics tell us that God loves us. You may be tempted to say that this is a detail about God. Don't. It is a misleading detail that does not do God's love for us justice - a detail that diminishes God's love for us - a detail that reduces it from extraoridanary love to ordinary love - a detail that makes our God smaller than he is. God does not just love us. Our God has more than mere love for us - much, much more. Our God loves us even though we tortured and killed him - even though we made him suffer and die. Do you get it? Do you appreciate the difference? Loving us in good times is not the same as loving us in adversity. The latter is much harder than the former. Furthermore, when creatures create the adversity for their Creator, we are astonished that our Creator's love for us persists! Our Church divorces God's love for us from the irrefutable evidence that proves it. The evidence is the "pixie dust" that gives the proposition that God loves us its overwhelming persuasive power. The Church mistakenly thinks that we are supposed to be impressed by a tabula rasa God because, details or not, a tabula rasa God is still our God. Mere divinity, however, does not titillate us. An insipid God only stimulates our indifference. The pisspoor, low quality, colorless, one dimensional presentation of God by a clueless, clerical salesforce has caused the children of Adam and Eve to lose interest in their God, and, hence in his Church. The thermometer that gauges the temperature of the body of Christ is the practice of Christianity. By this measure, the patient is moribund - a few breaths away from death . God is presented as neither sweet nor sour, hot nor cold, so we spue him out of our mouth . He is irrelevant - not a factor who influences how we conduct our lives. Our God has become a stranger to us. Nobody follows a stranger . “And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers” . "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" . Without a high fidelity understanding of God (a best approximation of God), our perception of reality is limited. We do not see the complete picture. The truth is hidden from us. Misconceptions about God, however, are not harmless. They are dangerous. Any distortion of the truth is a threat. Our rationality steers the ship. The truth is the fuel of our rationality. When fueled by the the truth, our rationality steers us in the right direction. When the fuel of truth is fouled by a lie, our rationality leads us astray . God appeals to our rationality with the truth. Our God is the artist who paints the masterpiece of reality on the canvas of our rationality in the pigments of truth. God's plan is to put us in intimate contact with the truth itself - both the sour truth and the sweet truth. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” . Indeed, the sour truth plays rough. Our crosses chew us up into bits and pieces. Our baptism in the sour truth of the Valley of Tears is harsh medicine. However, it is also effective medicine. So God prescribes it. Our baptism in the sour truth of the Valley of Tears is the glue that binds us to the gift of paradise. Lucifer, the gaggle of angels who follow Lucifer, Eve and Adam all were given the gift of paradise but fumbled the ball. They were not baptized in the sour truth. They had no glue to bind them to the gift of paradise. Thus, they let the gift of paradise slip through their fingers. We, however, do. The prodigal son will never go back to the pig sty. Neither will we. Our baptism in the sour truth of the Valley of Tears makes us know better than to release our grip on the gift of paradise. We are disobedient not irrational. The sour truth is autodidactic. It testifies to itself. However, the sweet truth needs witnesses to testify to it in the Valley of Tears. The testimony of witnesses reveals God to us . "To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth" . Jesus testified about the sweet truth when he played the starring role in the apocalyptic events that transpired on the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection. The job of the Church is to preserve and propagate his testimony. The job of the Church is to make the unknown God known. The job of the Church is to transport the revelation that Jesus deposited on the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection from then and there, across space and time, to us here and now. The vehicle with which God equipped his Church to convey the revelation to us is the Mass. On the road from the Crucifixion to the Resurrection, Jesus revealed God to us in his answer to the evil that we did to him. His answer is the blessed byproduct of his radical love of the children of Adam and Eve. Intimate contact with the truth is the motive force that drives the new Exodus. The sour truth pushes the new Exodus to the exit of godlessness. The sweet truth pulls the new Exodus to the entrance of paradise. Together, the two engines of truth generate the current of salvation. The current of salvation sweeps us off our feet and carries us to our salvation. Few swim against the tide. Intimate contact with the truth propels the new Exodus to make its escape from slavery under the yoke of Pharaoh, through the Valley of Tears, across the Red Sea of death, to freedom with God and his Holy family in the promised land, the land of milk and honey. What an amazing adventure! The new Exodus is marching hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm, together as one family to the rhythmic beat of the loving heart of our living God! Discover the sweetness of paradise for yourself here on earth. God poured the sweet syrup of love into our circumstances. The sweet syrup of love dilutes the toxicity of the Valley of Tears in the same way that sugar cubes dilute the bitterness of a cup of bad coffee. Join the escape. Rejoice and be glad!
The greatest obstacle blocking us from participating in the new Exodus is our superficial understanding of God