Little Boxes

This morning as I sat in the quiet of my office, candles casting a soft luminance across my desk, shadows quietly dancing to the movement of the flames, an image formed in my mind.
The image was of a man wearing a robe with gold woven into it. He was leading a procession down a street.
There were some others wearing similar robes. Someone carried a banner like a flag.
Many people followed in the train of these men.
They appeared to be full of joy, singing together.

I wondered at this for a moment.

Then, I realized that I recognized these people.
They were walking away from a church that had at one time been a place where the Holy Spirit was alive and active.

But, something happened to change that.

The people created boxes.
They were pretty boxes.
There were green ones and red ones. Some purple and still others yellow and blue.
The people I saw marching down the street each held one of the boxes.

“What’s in those boxes?” I asked.

“Why, God, of course,” came the reply.

My forehead furrowed as I looked on, perplexed.
“Those boxes are awfully small,” I said. “How did they get God into those?”

The answer surprised me.

“All of those people shrunk God so that God would fit!” the voice said. The tone was like a person stating something so obvious that the question was just silly.
“They have each imagined God as a small, parochial deity that can only do certain small things.
The God of their imagination cannot accept anyone who has not prayed a certain prayer in a very certain way. This God is not capable of loving the many and diverse people and creatures of the Cosmos. Only people who look like them are acceptable to their God. These people have very strict rules about what their God is allowed to do. God must be able to fit inside of their small imagination. So, naturally, this God must be small enough to fit in the boxes!”

As I sat there considering what I had just seen and heard, I could not help feeling sorry for those people. They had created a god that fit their own idea of what a god was. This god is impotent. It is incapable of expressing divine love because it is constructed out of the paper mache of the human mind. It really is sad.

I can understand it a little, though.
If we allow God to exist outside of our little boxes then God might just do something we don’t expect. God might surprise us with the vastness and ferociousness of Divine Love. We might even find ourselves changed! Our hearts and imaginations might become vast and ferocious as well. We might find that we are compelled to Love Others. If we’re not careful we may find ourselves caring about the Cosmos like it was our very own backyard.

We can’t have that kind of stuff happening…

Can we?