God Image vs. God Concept
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength…You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12:29-31
Last week we started a journey towards receiving God’s love and entering deeper into His abundant heart. First, we have learned to take the focus off of ourselves and look to God: You are God. I am not.
The second way to receive his love is to realize we have false images of God. How can we love God with our heart, soul, mind, strength, and our neighbor as ourself (Mark 12:30-32) if we don’t really know who God is? We can’t!
Dr. Peter Malinoski and Dr. Gerry Crete at Souls and Hearts introduce the difference of a God image and a God concept. A God image is the feeling of who I interpret God to be at that moment. It is an emotional and subjective experience of God that is shaped by our relationship with our parents and is dynamic and changing.
A God concept is an intellectual understanding of who God is based on our beliefs and what the Bible and Catechism teach about God. We decide to believe who God is based on our intellect rather than our emotions.
If our goal is to love God with our whole heart, mind, soul, strength, and our neighbor as ourself, we need to have an integrated concept of God in our heart, mind, soul, strength.
Let’s dive deeper into the problem: We don’t know God for who He really is. Going back to Genesis and Adam and Eve in the garden, they were introduced to a false image of God by the serpent. They believed the lie that God was not a good Father who could be trusted.
Their response to this lie and their disobedience of God by eating the forbidden fruit led to them hide and stay in their woundedness. They had a false view of God, what Dr. Peter Malinoski calls a “heretical God image.” By hiding in the garden they were trying to protect themselves from a God who didn’t really exist.
When we, like Adam and Eve, listen to lies and stay in our woundedness, our God concept is poisoned. Then we will believe God is who we FEEL him to be and gradually over time we experience a lack of confidence in God’s goodness and mercy.
So what’s the solution? We can either deny that these problematic God images exist, or we can confront them.
We can invite the Lord into our disordered God images and seek healing.
Dr. Peter gives five attachment needs that we were created with in regards to our relationship with God as our Father:
we need to feel seen and known by God
we need to feel safe and secure by God
we need to feel comforted and reassured by God
we need to feel cherished and delighted in by God
we need to believe God wills what is best for us
If our God image is distorted, we can look to experiences where we have not felt one or more of the above. By exploring these parts of ourselves we can extend compassion, form a relationship with them, and gradually, with God’s grace, heal any disordered image of God.
The key is to allow ourselves to feel the way we feel. When we accept our feelings and don’t judge ourselves for them, we can have compassion on ourselves and invite the Lord in to meet our needs.
Dr. Peter shares what he calls an “experiential exercise” to meet our Lord in prayer to discover a false image of God and invite God in.
Go to a place emotionally where you have felt a strong emotion (isolated, abandoned, angry, anxious, etc.) and write down how you FEEL God to be (maybe distant, disappointed, etc.) You can also draw a picture if that helps.
Then look at how the God image you just described measures up to the five attachment needs above. Which ones are lacking?
Finally, reach out to God in prayer in a relational way and ask him to meet your needs in those specific areas that were lacking.
For example, if you felt abandoned and didn’t sense God was present with you, you could pray, “God, help me know that you are with me and will never leave or forsake me. God, help me to know that you delight in me.”
Next week I’ll share an experience I’ve had recently where I’ve invited the Lord into a wound of rejection and have experienced a deeper outpouring of his love!
If you’d like to hear more about healing our disordered God images check out episodes 23 and 24 on Dr. Peter Malinoski’s podcast: Interior Integration for Catholics here.
And you can find more resources at his website: https://www.soulsandhearts.com/
