The God who says "Wow!"

The rain began about ten minutes after I began my walk this afternoon, ten minutes after I had consulted my iPhone's weather app and had received assurance that there would be no rain today.  The rain continued for the entire hour and 45 minutes of my walk -- not pouring but not just drizzling either.  

Once I became saturated and stopped worrying about it, I realized that I was comfortable and not cold,  I enjoyed walking in the rain, and noticed signs all about me that the Groundhog had been correct and that we were to have an early spring -- flowers popping out in places, and buds emerging on shrubbery and forming on smaller trees.  The damp air just felt like spring

I'm not usually inclined toward theological introspections as I walk, but I began wondering about God and how he felt about spring, or, more precisely, how he felt about the way we humans -- at least in northern climes -- react to spring's arrival.  The feelings of joy and relief we experience, almost worshipping the earth and its bounty. 

I recalled a pastoral letter I'd once read.  Our then pastor, Father John, was a fine writer, and he emailed us a letter each week with his thoughts.  I saved most of them from the time I transferred into his parish until he began a sabbatical last summer.  I searched back, and located the letter I remembered, from November 2018.

Fr. John had been on retreat in central Oregon: camping, and walking through the woods, along the Metolius river, "taking photos and thinking of the Trinity."  (Well, you know, it was his profession.)  And he'd been thinking along the same lines as I was today -- does God enjoy the beauties of his Creation, as we do?  How does an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, as theologians describe him -- one who knew, from the "outset," everything that ever occured or will occur, from the Big Bang to the Final Event -- perceive our petty loves and hatreds, our joys and sorrows?  Knowing it all from the first moment of time, as we reckon time, does he cast a cold eye on it all, like an author re-reading a book he has just finished writing?  

God is unchangeable, according to theologians.  But Fr. John writes:

Anyone who has stood by a bedside of a dying parent, knowing that they must pass, and then experienced the moment they do, understands what I am saying.  Do we think God never has that experience?  The idea that God was not changed by the death of Jesus, by his suffering and loss, seems untenable to me.  And in the same way, that God does not feel wonder and joy at the experience -- which transcends mere knowledge -- of the light hitting the leaf, seems to me equally absurd.   

He admits, with humor, that some have called him heretical, but he comes right out with it.  He is obviously anthropomorphizing, but doesn't God's becoming human in the Incarnation encourage us to do just that?

I realize that for me, on this cold and beautiful morning, all the theological conceptions feel a bit sterile and meaningless.  I think I am tired of the God of the theologians, the “omni” God who has all those characteristics taken from Greek philosophy: e.g., omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence. This God, frozen in the amber of theological perfection, seems nothing like the God of this forest, or of this river, or of the Jesus I have come to know; for this “perfect” God is never surprised or awed. This God never feels the anguish of a loss or the wonder of something beautiful being born. This perfect, unchanging God never, it seems, says “Wow!” Walking here, beneath the trees and beside the river, watching the water jump up in a flash against a log, I am not sure I can believe in a God who does not say, “Wow!”

I don't think Fr. John was saying that traditional theology is "wrong," merely that it's inadequate.  The philosophy of Aristotle, on which it's based, is fine as far as it goes, but our human brains are unable to fully comprehend reality as God himself views it -- any more than the chessmen in a chess game understand that the next move has been delayed because the players have paused the game for lunch.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord.

Isaiah 55:8. 

We lack humility when we try to pin God down to our human descriptions, using our human languages.  John Calvin was an excellent thinker, but in my opinion made this error when he latched on to the concepts of God's omnipotence and omniscience, and ended up with a monstrous but coldly logical theology that seems to have very little to do with the spirit of the Gospels.  

Fr. John, a highly educated Jesuit, concludes  that God is

Not the "omni" God at all, but the God who weeps and laughs; the God who says "Wow!"

As I'm sure he would be the first to admit, he is only guessing, thinking with his intuition, with his heart.  But a God who seeks to save men and women from their own stupidity by sending his Son to live and die as an example for them seems less likely to be an abstract and remote principle of perfection, and more likely to be a God who does, at least on occasion, say "Wow!"