Lenten Day Twenty-seven: Dennis Linn

March 15, 2024 Photo credit: Pixabay

“We become like the God we adore.”  Dennis Linn

When I began this Lenten series of quotations, I opened with one from Pelagius (c. 354–418), a British theologian who emphasized freedom of choice in salvation and “original goodness” as opposed to “original sin,” and thus was deemed a heretic by many.  He wrote: “Write down with your own hand on paper what God has written with his hand on the human heart.”  That is what I have been attempting to do here. It is my Lenten prayer each day. I am not a renowned theologian or a biblical scholar, but my conviction is that what God wants written on the human heart is all-encompassing, unconditional, unbreakable love.  That’s why this morning’s quotation is so relevant to me.

This powerful line is taken from the book Good Goats:  Healing Our Image of God, by psychologist Dennis Linn, his wife Sheila Linn, and Roman Catholic brother and priest Matthew Linn.  Dennis Linn writes: “Most of us recognize that we become like our parents whom from early on we adore, even with all their faults.  We may not realize that we also become like the God we adore.”  The God the Linns adored, Dennis goes on to say, was “German,” modeled after his family’s German heritage.  That God was male, authoritarian, self-righteous, cold, and punitive, ready to toss those he disapproved of into hell. That God, however, doesn’t need to be German; it is close to the God I grew up with and that many of us have experienced and may still experience.  The issue is that we become like the God we adore.

The premise of this book is that if we adore a “German” God, we ourselves will become authoritarian, self-righteous, cold, and punitive in our relationships with others.  Our ability to be forgiving, merciful, kind, loving, and charitable will be tossed out the window.  We will live rigid lives in quest of salvation, in fear of hell, and suspicious of love. Just look around at today’s world and at today’s most popular churches where everything is divided into black and white, good and bad, “Christian” and non-Christian. The vast amount of gray is discounted or ignored.  “We find,” Linn writes, “that a key to personal and social healing is healing our image of God.”  Reread that. Wow.

There are, of course, other gods we adore that we also become like.  Take the god of war.  Or the god of power.  Or the god of fear. Or the god of wealth.  Or the god of resentment.  Or the god of pleasure. Idols abound that want us to bow down to them.

So, if it’s true that we become like the God we adore, what is the image of that God?  Jesus of Nazareth states clearly that “Whoever has seen Me, has seen the Father” (John 14:9).  Do we believe that line of scripture?  If so, then God must be forgiving, grace-filled, inclusive, healing, welcoming, patient, self-sacrificing, unbiased, and loving.  When this kind of God is the one we adore, then we, too, hopefully become more forgiving, grace-filled, inclusive, healing, welcoming, self-sacrificing, unbiased, and loving.  Perhaps that is what God is writing on our human hearts, and hoping for, this very day.

Blessings ~ Rosemary