by Andrew Senior

THE

WONDER OF GOD

by Andrew Senior

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 deeprooted 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-ofbody 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!”

Andrew Senior lives in Sheffield and writes short fiction, poetry and reflections on faith: https://andrewseniorwriting. weebly.com