What, or who, is God?

An old man in the clouds?

Is God an old man with a beard sitting in the clouds surrounded by choirs of harp-playing angels? Or is he a stern figure looking down from on high, waiting angrily for us to slip up? Many people think that he is like that, or something similar. It is hardly surprising then, that there’s a lot of confusion out there about God's identity. It is easy to form our own ideas about him without basing those thoughts on what is actually reasonable. We can get a little bit suspicious, especially if we have come from a Catholic background where, for example, we feel that we were forced to go to Mass as a child. The chances are that our idea of God will be through the lens of a childhood duty to please our parents, or to do as we are told. We may well look a little bit suspiciously at God and everything to do with him. 

So just what, or who, is God?

To start with, God is not just ‘there’, as a kind of impassive mover, like a watchmaker winding everything up and letting it run. Above all, God is a person. And people relate to one another. Therefore, God relates to me.

It is perhaps this fact about God that causes so much difficulty today: we cannot see him, so how can anyone relate to him, especially if he is so stern?