c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is the publisher of RNS.)

UNDATED _ After years of listening to Sunday school lessons and sermons, reading theological books and magazines, even interviewing some of the greatest theologians and philosophers around, I have come to a startling conclusion: I am no closer to understanding who God is.

In fact, the older I get, the more I realize that I just don’t get God at all.

There is one thing I do understand now: God is so much bigger than I give him credit for on most days that it must give him a holy migraine just to diminish his greatness enough so I can have a passing glimpse of him.

The corollary to that is that I am so limited in my understanding _ or perhaps in my faith _ that mostly I am happy to attribute to God what I see through reflective lens, extrapolating my extremely limited view of the world to the Creator’s vision of the universe.

And that is a perfect way to get myself in trouble.

So I look for clues from other people. Those who may have better holy vision or more sensitive souls. Those who speak of God as if they know him well.

For example, the recent birth of the octuplets in Houston may have intrigued some folks for medical reasons, but I saw it as one more opportunity to learn more about God. Each baby was named for an attribute of God by Iyke Louis Udobi and his wife, Nkem Chukwu, who were described as”deeply religious.” She seemed saintly, putting up with pain and suffering in the final months to improve the chances of health for her babies. They both seemed genuinely humble and grateful, attributing their blessings to God.

When asked if they had ever considered”selective reduction,”the procedure in which some of the fertilized embryos are destroyed to give the others a better chance of survival, they were confident.”I wasn’t even going to give it a thoughtâÂ?¦”said Chukwa.”I’ve never seen such a word in the Bible.” I wasn’t at the press conference, but I really want to ask them _ and I’m not being facetious at all _”How did you decide to have fertility treatments, then? That isn’t covered in the Bible either.” See, what I really wonder about, the older I get, is just when we humans are supposed to mess in God’s business.

I have a good friend who is a brilliant woman but chooses to ignore modern medicine entirely because she is a Christian Scientist. I have another friend who believes God has given us the latest medical advances and we should use every one of them and”give God the glory,”as she says.

The focus on these types of questions usually comes on either end of the continuum of life, although it seems to me that theologians concentrate more on how much we manipulate death than how we deal with the beginning of life.

But I don’t really want to wait around for ethicists to rule on what is right and wrong. By the time they work it out, hundreds of individuals will have made agonizing personal decisions that may fall on the wrong side of the code they establish.

I simply want to know more about who God is and how much he wants us to trust him. After all, if we believe in God as all-powerful (that is in the Bible), when do we end our pathetic little acts of cosmic intervention and just get on our knees and pray? If we believe God is all-knowing (that’s in the Bible, too), when do we stop our research and simply cry out for a miracle? If we believe God is omnipresent (definitely a biblical term), then at what point do we stop our extraordinary efforts to fly a doctor in to an emergency situation and instead ask the God who we believe is already there to pull out his ultimate doctor’s kit and breath life back into the victim?

Mostly, how do we make those decisions when they come down to our own life or that of someone we love?

How do we decide when God is saying no or when he is challenging us to try a little harder on our own?

I don’t think I’m the only one who has more questions than answers, more ambiguity than clarity. So to all you clergy and theologians out there, could we get back to the basics? This year could you cancel some sermons on current issues and concentrate on that most basic issue of all: Just who do we think God is, anyway?

DEA END BOURKE