It's dangerous to hijack God

This week's Independent News & Media Irish regional newspapers' column.

Michael Commane

It is Easter Week, the schools are closed and those preparing for public exams have a short term ahead of them because Easter is late this year.

There is regularly a discussion about making Easter a fixed date in the calendar.

At present Easter Sunday falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

And please don’t misspeak the Saturday before Easter Sunday as it is Holy Saturday. Easter Saturday is this coming Saturday, the Saturday of Easter Week.

It sounds as if there is nothing easy and simple about Easter. Then again, is there anything simple about our lives?

Easter Sunday is one of the days in the year when Christian churches are relatively full. It is the most important feast in the Christian calendar. It’s the celebration of the resurrection and our belief in that event.

Isn’t it an amazing thing to say - that Jesus Christ rises from the dead. Everything about God to the human mind is amazing.

How easy we can use the word God without actually thinking about the enormity of it all.

Earlier this month we saw the first ever pictures of a Black Hole. The pictures had been taken by means of a number of high-powered telescopes around the world.

This Black Hole is 500 billion billion kilometres distant from us and it is 65 billion times bigger than the sun.

Light, which travels at the speed of 300,000 kilometres per second or 186,000 miles per second, is incapable of penetrating a Black Hole.

Extraordinary facts and for most of us, ordinary mortals, facts away beyond our comprehension.

These pictures support what Einstein was saying.

Einstein considered himself an agnostic but admitted that he was not an atheist.

When I was reading and listening to the news stories about the Black Hole the word God came to mind. What do we know about God?

Christians say that God becomes man and that Jesus Christ is both God and man.

Christian philosophers and theologians say that one of the great differences between us and God is that God is existence whereas we have existence.

The idea of existence is exciting. Before we can say anything else about a thing, the most basic statement we can make about something is that it is.

And then I am off thinking about how little discussion or debate there is about the notion of God. All our scraps and disagreements in matters of religion are about issues of far less importance, indeed, most of them dealing with matters sexual.

We have just celebrated the biggest feast in the Christian calendar but what actually does it mean to say Christ rises from the dead? What does it mean to say that we are destined for resurrection? Of course these are major matters of faith but surely there is only one reality so what’s true in the realm of the supernatural must also be true in the natural word.

The story of the Black Hole is extraordinary, and wonderful too and so too the story of God.

But don’t we need to be especially careful saying anything about God.

Might it be that it is extremely easy with pious words to cliché God out of existence?

God’s greatness is far beyond any trite easy words. Is it that so often we create our own image of God? Isn’t that what idolatry is?

It’s dangerous, unholy too, to hijack God.