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The small hidden God

  • HEATHER KING

The small, hidden, anonymous God I found in the Gospels appealed to me deeply.


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It's easy to scoff at miracles, but another thing I liked about Christ was that he never performed magic-trick miracles; he didn't pull rabbits out of a hat, or produce gold ingots. 

He performed the miracle of the loaves and the fishes; he made the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear.  He performed miracles to bring people alive; he operated on a higher level of reality in order to bring love into the world. 

He didn't go off and sit in a cave and grant folks an audience one by one, like some wise old shaman, either; he mingled. He ate and drank with people; he touched them, human flesh to human flesh: demoniacs, lepers. And when he did heal, he never held the people up as sideshow freaks or floor models to show how great he was...

The small, hidden, anonymous God I found in the Gospels appealed to me deeply.  It was the God I'd found in sobriety, who worked through other people, who had a sense of humor, who held me accountable and forgave me at the same time.  Who didn't force or judge, just invited me to do a little better, then put the challenges in my path to teach me how. 

Christ subverted all worldly systems — political, familial, financial: not for the sake of being subversive, but because acting with utter integrity is automatically subversive.  He was left of the furthest left and right of the furthest right, both radically liberal and radically conservative.  In one breath he could say, "Honor your father and your mother" (Mk 7:10) and in another, "let the dead bury their own dead" (Lk 9:60).

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Acknowledgement

Heather King. "The small hidden God." excerpt from Redeemed: Stumbling Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding (New York: Viking Publishing, Penguin Group Inc., 2008).

This excerpt appeared in Magnificat in October 2012.

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The Author

king king1 Heather King is a sober alcoholic, an ex-lawyer, a Catholic convert, and a full-time writer. She is the author of: Parched, Redeemed: Stumbling Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding, Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Poor Baby, Stripped, Holy Days and Gospel Reflectionsand Stumble: Virtue, Vice, and the Space Between. She lives in Los Angeles. Visit her website here

Copyright © Heather King