'I AM' … Through All Generations
Our first reading from this past weekend was the story of Moses and the Burning Bush. This is one of the most well-known stories in the Old Testament. In this story, we come face to face with the unknowable mystery of God. When asked to identify Himself to Moses, God simply says, “I AM who I am.” God goes on to say, “This is my name forever; thus am I to be remembered through all generations.”
“I AM” is how God wants all human beings to remember Him – as a being who cannot be confined in a single name, a single image or even a thought. And yet, despite God’s unwillingness to describe Himself or to limit our understanding of Him, there have always been people who try to do so. A great deal of violence in history and even in the world today can be attributed to conflicting ideas about God. The way that we see and understand God is largely dependent upon our own life experiences and how we have been taught to see and understand God. Most of us are Catholic because we were born into Catholic families or because we married into Catholic families or otherwise came into contact with Catholic people. If we had been born into a Jewish family or a Muslim family, odds are that we would be Jewish or Muslim. Just as none of us got to choose what country we were born in, none of us gets to choose what faith we are born into, if any. Likewise, few of us (other than adult RCIA participants) choose to educate ourselves in a certain religion. How many of us decided on our own to attend Mass, Catholic schools or religion classes as children? For most of us, our image of God is shaped not by God Himself, but by our family, our culture and our personal experiences in the world. This is not a bad thing, but if we become convinced that our image of God is the right one or the only acceptable one, we run the risk of our faith becoming a threat to others.
When we attempt to confine God within the limits of our own understanding or within the boundaries of our own country or culture, we are sometimes tempted to view people from different mindsets, different countries or different cultures as our enemies. This kind of thinking was responsible for horrors such as the Spanish Inquisition and it is also responsible for the suffering and deaths of people today. More than 120 Christians have been murdered in Nigeria since February. Eleven Jewish people were murdered in the Tree of Life Temple shooting in Pittsburgh last October. Fifty Muslim people, including children, were murdered in the Christchurch Mosque shooting just a few weeks ago. And the violence will continue as long as people believe that their own image of God and their own name for God is more important than the lives of people God created.
In the Bible, God is almost always encountered in wide open spaces such as deserts and mountaintops. This week, as we continue on our Lenten journey, may we open our minds to the awesome mystery of God without attempting to confine Him within the boundaries of our own way of thinking about Him. And may we pray for an end to religious persecution and violence in our country and in our world.
