Changing our idea of God

(…)We discover one of the great fruits of meditation, in that this experience of God, silently and through stillness, and unselfconsciously, develops and flowers in us day by day through our journey of meditation. This experience of God sends us back to the words and the images of scripture, not only our own scripture but indeed all scriptures. It changes our idea of God as it changes our idea of ourselves. I think we notice phrases, words, images in scripture that we didn’t even notice before. We notice that Jesus, for example, calls God the One who truly is; we notice that St Paul calls God the Source, the Goal and the Guide. We begin to understand what St John means when he says that God is greater than our conscience, a very liberating idea which we can only even begin to understand from our own experience of God. That God is greater than our conscience means that God is deeper than our own selfprojection, deeper than our guilt, deeper than our fear of punishment; God, as St John says, knows all.

( Aspects of Love 3, by Laurence Freeman )