A great actor/actress can handle a wide variety of roles. Sometimes they can so effectively become “another person” that at first we don’t realize who they really are.
Others may be excellent and entertaining performers, but they’re always more or less playing the same kind of character even in very different situations.
In life, each of us has a variety of roles to play and, similarly, sometimes, for better or for worse, we’re playing the same character throughout. For example, you may be a good mother, but you’re not a good sister if you treat your adult siblings like children.
As a priest, I’m used to being called “Father”, but a more accurate label for what people expect might be “Brother”. Most people want understanding and compassion from a priest more than paternal correction and being told what to do.
There also are various categories of roles we play throughout our lives. Some are rooted in biology like child or senior, sister or brother, mother or father, aunt or uncle.
Some are the result of actions we take such as husband or wife, employee or employer, leader or follower; others result from the actions or rules of others like victim or prisoner, citizen or illegal alien, celebrity or outcast.
And, of course, the passage of our lives casts us in different roles all the time.
What defines each role we play is relationship, and most of the labels we use for them involve relationships
If I have great love and concern within me, but never manifest it to others in word or deed, then I can’t be considered a lover or an empath. I’m not playing the role, even though perhaps I could.
There’s no hypocrisy in all of this. We all behave differently to different people at different times. We don’t act the same with every other person we relate to in our lives. We are multifaceted, complex beings.
If each of us has a variety of relationships in our lives and a variety of roles to play—if each of us doesn’t communicate all that we are and all that we can be in every relationship we have, what about God?
Over the centuries, different religious traditions have developed different ways to describe the different relationships we have to God and the different relationships God has to us.
For example, in the early books of the Bible, God is described as the personal God of Abraham. Later he’s called the God of his immediate descendants, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Later still God is considered the family or tribal God of the Israelites (the descendants of Jacob).
It is took some centuries before the Israelites moved from polytheism to monotheism, from “You shall not have other gods beside me.” to a denial of the very existence of “other gods”.
The Messianic Jews (the early Christians) began to describe the one and only God in terms of a variety of relationships and ways of communication, especially as:
– Father: God in the role of the ultimate source of all being and life, the maker, the creator, the sustainer.
– Son: God self-manifesting through the long-awaited Messiah, Jesus, and his life, example, and teachings.
– Spirit: God communicating and acting through each, every, and all human persons, in the depths of their being.
We don’t have up-to-date words to label this complexity, and some of our traditional words no longer mean what once they did.
We believe in one God, although “Holy Trinity” almost sounds like we don’t!
20 June 2021