Day 3 Angry God

God Judging Adam, William Blake, 1795

                        (see also Adorable Person, All-forgiving Gentleness)

“Now listen to what goes on in many a nursery: ––'God does not love you, you naughty, wicked boy!' 'He will send you to the bad, wicked place!' and so on; and this is all the practical teaching about the ways of his 'almighty Lover' that the child gets! ––never a word of how God does love and cherish the little children all day long, and fill their hours with delight. Add to this, listless perfunctory prayers, idle discussions of Divine things in their presence, light use of holy words, few signs whereby the child can read that the things of God are more to his parents than any things of the world, and the child is hindered, tacitly forbidden to ‘come unto Me,’––and this, often, by parents who in the depths of their hearts desire nothing in comparison with God.”

                                                    *

“God presented to Children as an Exactor and a Punisher. ––‘If we think of God as an exactor and not a giver,’ it has been well said, ‘exactors and not givers shall we become.’”
 
                                                    *
 
“It is a very sad fact that many children get their first ideas of God in the nursery, and that these are of a Being on the watch for their transgressions and always ready to chastise. It is hard to estimate the alienation which these first ideas of the divine Father set up in the hearts of His little children.”
 
                                                   *
 
“The God I was told about in church, and still hear about from time to time, runs about like an anxious schoolmaster measuring people’s behaviour with a moral yardstick. But the God I know is the source of reality rather than morality, the source of what is rather than what ought to be. This does not mean that God has nothing to do with morality: morality and its consequences are built into the God-given structure of reality itself. Moral norms are not something we have to stretch for, and moral consequences are not something we have to wait for: they are right here, right now, waiting for us to honor, or violate, the nature of self, other, world.”                                                                 
                                                      ~ Parker Palmer

                                                    *

“Theologians have done more to hide the Gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries.”                                                                                                                                                                                                  
                                                      ~ George MacDonald
 
 
 
 
Examen:  How has God been presented to me?  Could I be presenting a Cosmic Measurer instead of the Adorable Person in either words or actions?

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Now listen to:  Charlotte M. Mason Home Education, 1:20.
God presented to Children: 1:346.
 It is a very sad:  Charlotte M. Mason, School Education,  3:145.
The God I was: Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation By Parker J. Palmer (Hardcover, 1999), 50.
Theologians have done: George MacDonald, “Unspoken Sermons Second Series,” n.d., 46.

Day 3 Angry God meditation/100 Days copyright Laurie Bestvater 2025

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