The Wonder of God
When I was young – preteen – without the distractions of responsibility and expectation that come with adult life, I sometimes found myself dwelling deeply on the mystery of why I existed. How had I become a person? Why did I look like I did? Why did anyone look like they did? Where was I before I existed? If God made me, how did God get there? What was beyond God? For a few moments nothing around me seemed real. It was what I imagine an out of body experience is like. It is not a sensation I’ve really had as an adult.
In his 1927 essay “The future of an illusion”, Sigmund Freud wrote that “It would be a very long time before an uninfluenced child began spontaneously to have thoughts about God and matters beyond this world.” By this definition, I was not an uninfluenced child. I was raised by Christian parents, I was taken to church each week, church community was a significant part of my life. Undoubtedly this upbringing sowed a seed and caused me to think as I did. But I do not feel, as Freud goes on to say, that I was “fed the teachings of religion” at a time when I was “neither interested in them nor able to grasp their scope.”
Freud’s essay focuses on the concept of religion as what he calls an item of culture, a set of ideas put upon people: “intellectual prohibition” leading to “intellectual enfeeblement,” and ultimately serving no greater purpose than wish-fulfilment. Rather, I was introduced to the idea of God as a living being at a young age and it unlocked something deep-rooted and inherent to my sense of being, something that went far beyond mere religious teaching. Far from being disinterested or unable to grasp the scope, I remember contemplating the immeasurableness of God with fear and wonder. To my child’s “influenced” mind it was simply not feasible that I just existed, that I came from nothing and would return to nothing.
I grew up and read the Bible and found many places in the New Testament that corroborated my out-of-body boyhood experience. Corroborated it and explained it in wonderful ways.
1 John is written with the firm conviction that it is possible to abide forever. John speaks of an eternal life with the Father. Something that exists already, elsewhere, in a different place. More powerful still, the Father has revealed this eternal life through his Son (1 John 1:2) and by believing in the name of the Son I can know I have eternal life (1 John 5:13). Not because I have loved God but because he has loved me and sent his one and only Son into the world to be the atoning sacrifice for my sins, I am alive in Christ (1 John 4: 9-10).
From my experience, I firmly believe that young minds can be filled with the magnitude and the unfathomableness of God, and to foster and encourage such contemplation is to his glory. I have witnessed him take my own wonderings and mould them into a living faith in him. Freud would dismiss my youthful sense of mystery and awe as a religious illusion, motivated only by something I wished could be true. Instead, I have had my eyes opened to 1 John 3:1:
“See what sort of love the Father has given to us: that we should be called God’s children—and indeed we are!”