What Shape is your God Box?

20th September 2006 - Pokhara
This week, several young Hindu girls were taken to the local hospital here in Pokhara after swooning and fainting as the result of an intense religious experience during a school retreat. Nothing unusual about that, you might say, and you'd be right. Young girls have been fainting and swooning for just about as long as God has been revealing Her/Himself to mankind. However, if the experience were genuine, how would we know if it were God (as we know Him) or some other spiritual deity?
A friend who worked as a broadcaster in the days when it was call "The Wireless" said that radio is its own wardrobe mistress. By this he meant that because the medium was non visual, each listener was forced to imagine for themselves how each of the characters looked, thereby making each character unique to each listener. If this is so, then why couldn't the same parallel be used to describe God whom many of us have experienced but none of us has seen.
Promoters of the self awareness programme "Forum" use the term "Already Always Listening" to describe how our cultural background and social expectations prefilter our interpretation of whatever we see or hear. In other words, our human default setting is to see and hear what we expect to see and hear according to cultural background etc. It's easy to debate the theologies people set up to explain (and defend) their experiences of God, but it's far harder to dispute the actual experience itself.Is it possible, perhaps, that most religious experiences are actually God (as we know Him) but that we simply interpret them as either Christian, Jewish Muslim etc according to our own "Already Always Listening"?
David du Plessis, a respected Pentecostal world leader and advisor to Pope John Paul II's Eccumenical Council in the 1980s was sent to Madgegoria (?) to report on the sighting by several young children of the Virgin Mary. In his report David said that whilst he personally had no paradigm to understand or interpret their religious experience in the terms they used, he had no doubt whatsoever that they had all had an intense personal encounter with the Living God, and quoted Jesus' own words "By their fruits shall you know them".My wish/prayer for these young girls of Pokhara is that their religious experience will change their lives as dramatically as it did for the children of Madgegoria and that they would begin to understand the enormous depth of God's personal love for each of them. No matter how they may imagine or interpret Him. Perhaps God is more interested in the fact that we respond to His initiative rather than the shape of the box we put Him in.