Can God see me when I go to the bathroom?

(and other tough questions kids ask)

Some time ago, I was asked to meet with the catechism class of St. Leander's Parish located in San Leandro, California. Like so many parishes today, St. Leander's catechism classes fill a growing void in Christian education between infant Baptism and teenage Confirmation. If it were not for these catechism classes, many Catholic children might never know the substance and meaning of their Baptism. The frontline troops in this necessary ministry of Christian education are brave and generous men and women who rise to the challenge of our Lord's call: "The harvest is plenty but few are the laborers." It is an exceedingly daunting call. Children, as we shall see, have a knack for asking the most profound and perplexing theological questions in deceptively simple terms. Perhaps this is so because, in their innocence, as Jesus said, they are close to the kingdom of heaven.

This turned out to be my experience with the Hispanic children of St. Leander's catechism classes. I came at the request of Senora Juanita Loza, our voluntary director of Christian education. In the capacity of a professional theologian, I was asked to answer pressing questions the children might have about God. I also came expecting some rather routine questions that could be answered right out of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I should have known better! On the shoulders of religious educators lies the major burden of transmitting the Catholic tradition in a fresh yet convincing manner. Moved by this realization, I felt compelled to take three of these questions children ask about God and give some indication of their complexity and a possible response. This article is for these brave and generous souls, who out of love for our children and the future of the church have dared to take on the challenges of Christian education.

How did God make the trees?

THIS QUESTION deceives in its innocent simplicity. We could answer it by simply saying: "God just said, `Let there be trees,' and there they were." This answer, of course, refers directly to the biblical account in Genesis. It gives a faithful but literal account of how God made trees. But is this a satisfying answer? Is there a certain challenge in this question that a literal account cannot answer? I believe so. Wrapped up and tangled together in this question lies the question of God's omnipotence, or, more specifically, the nature of God's power. Here lies, I believe, the actual significance of this child's question.

Perhaps in no other time in history has the power of God been so defiantly denied or questioned as in the present day. I am not speaking of atheism. The greatest questioning of God's omnipotence comes from those who believe profoundly in God. Such questioning emerges from various sources. Those who learn of the stark darkness of Auschwitz' human Holocaust question God's power. Those who come to understand the implications of the fatal brilliance of Hiroshima's nuclear holocaust question God's power. Those who are dazzled by the magic of modern technology question God's power. Those who have been taught in our schools the contingency and seeming arbitrariness of human knowledge question God's power.

These and many other sources of questioning God's power reveal the challenge in the question: How did God make the trees? The child who asks this question is the same one who is asked to believe in the transcendent power of God yet also inherits the burden of the human and nuclear holocaust, the arrogant acids of modern technological achievement, and the contemporary lack of confidence in the existence of truth, goodness, or beauty.

To meet the challenge, we must recognize that at its heart lies an ancient debate over the nature of God's power. The debate began with a seemingly innocent question. Can God create a world different from the present one? It was a question designed to probe our understanding of God's absolute power. If God can do whatever God wants, then God, of course, can create a different world from the present.

But if we affirm this obvious conclusion, another question is raised. Why did God create this world and not another? In other words, God can create any number of possible worlds, but God chose to create this world. Because of this choosing, God's power appears to have limits. It appears that God must choose. What kind of a God, then, do we have, who, possessing absolute power, deliberately limits it by using it to create this particular creation?

The ancient theologians attempted to solve this theological conundrum by making the distinction between God's absolute power (potentia Dei absoluta) and God's ordained power (potentia Dei ordinata). The fact of this world and not another belongs properly to God's ordaining power--that is, the power to design and order reality as God sees fit. The conviction, on the other hand, that God can make a different world belongs to God's absolute power--that is, the power to make things be or not be. With this distinction, theologians appeared to have solved the problem of trying to understand the nature of an absolutely powerful God who creates a rather limited and particular universe.

God's power, then, must be understood in two ways. As absolute, God's power answers Hamlet's question, To be or not to bet As ordaining, God's power answers a very different question, Why this world? Our child's question now reveals its challenge. In our day, the question concerning God's absolute power--namely, To be or not to be?--has taken center stage. A world become cynical and self-destructive asks, Why life is worth living? Indeed, it is the only question that adults in our day appear to be able to ask. Thus, we should be surprised at our child's question. Only an innocent child could ask the other question of God's power for the particular, the power to make the trees.

The child's question reminds the theologian that To be or not to be? cannot be answered effectively without also answering How did God make the trees? The reason this question of God's power is so hard to ask in a self-destructive world is that its answer can only be given in terms of God's love. God's ordaining power is God's loving power. God made this world because God loved this world and not another. God's love, however, is also the answer to God's absolute power. God loved this world into being.

Thus, the question of God's ordaining power holds the key to understanding God's absolute power. God's love and power are inextricably united.

Now the reason a child must ask about God's ordaining power becomes clear. God's love, indeed, the question of love itself, escapes the attention of a cynical and selfish world. Only one who has yet to be infected by the arrogant attitude of our modern world must raise it. It must be asked by one who can still, in innocent wonder, ask, How did God make the trees? And so, with this brief sketch of the theological issues raised by the simple question raised in Juanita Loza's catechism class, we can now attempt an answer for the child. (See the answer for the child on page 20.)

If God is everywhere, can God see me when I go to the bathroom?

THE QUESTION took me aback. I felt transported to another time. I could hear William Ockham loudly disagreeing with Saint Thomas Aquinas' description of one of God's attributes, omnipresence. Then, as now, the attribute of God's omnipresence raises the issue of how one speaks of God. If God is present everywhere, then can one also say God is present here in this particular place, this room, this bathroom?

To simply say, yes, of course, misses the nature of the theological tension involved in the question. It is God's transcendence that allows us to say that God is omnipresent. It is God's immanence, however, that urges us to say that God is present in this particular place. God's transcendence tells us God cannot be part of the world. God's immanence tells us God is active in the world. Faith affirms both of these conclusions even though they are based on two totally different and seemingly contradictory aspects of God. How can God both transcend the world yet be present in it?

Ockham and Aquinas notwithstanding, the dilemma over God's transcendence versus God's immanence increases when another point is raised. The child's question about being "seen" in the bathroom has another dimension. It is embarrassing to have someone watching you in the bathroom. Being embarrassed by our nakedness has strong theological overtones. Adam and Eve became ashamed of their nakedness when they sinned. God, taking pity on them, made them clothes. To be embarrassed by our nakedness before the sight of God (and each other) is a spiritual instinct of the need for mercy and forgiveness.

At the heart of this child's question may lie deeper one: What does God think of me if God sees everything I do? For if God can see everything, then God can see not only the good things that I do, but also the bad. Indeed, the core of this question is the instinctive sense of a spiritual struggle present within every human creature as articulated in Paul's Letter to the Romans:

   The good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not
   want--that is what I do. But every time I do what I do not want to, then it
   is not myself acting, but the sin that lives in me. So I find this rule:
   that for me, where I want to do nothing but good, evil is close at my side.
   In my inmost self I dearly love God's law, but I see that acting on my body
   there is a different law which battles against the law in my mind (Rom. 7:
   19-23, New Jerusalem Bible).

This spiritual struggle is different and unique for every human being and can only be acknowledged in the very intimacy of our soul. It is that deep intimacy that the Bible refers to as Adam and Eve's "nakedness," and it is the nature of that deep intimacy, I believe, that lies at the heart of the child's question.

The question of God's deep intimacy with us, fortunately, allows a profound yet child-satisfying answer. If the question of God's omnipresence becomes a question of God's intimacy, then Saint Augustine has a wonderful answer for us: intimior intimo meo ("God is closer to me than I am to myself").

What is nakedness before the eyes of the One who lovingly fashioned us into being? It is here where an answer to a child (or adult) may be crafted. One can say the nature of God's intimacy may be compared to the intimacy of a child to his or her mother. And that is how to begin to answer the child's question. (See the answer for the child on page 21.)

How big is God?

I ALMOST passed over this question until I saw a book at the Graduate Theological Union bookstore entitled How Large Is God? This book presents nine essays given by a variety of scholars, theologians, and scientists on the nature of the dimensions proper to God.

For the scientists, the question over the "bigness" of God concerns the relationship between science and religion. Science, after all, depends on measurement, but how can one measure God?

For scholars the question concerns the issue between the free pursuit of knowledge and the limits to such pursuit imposed by sacred authorities. Scholars may be open to talk about God but are suspicious of any (seemingly) arbitrary authority such as scripture or the church's magisterium.

For theologians, the question concerns theology itself as a discipline that can grow in knowledge even while asserting that the reality that is God shatters any human conceptions. Theologians believe so that they may understand, but the scholarly world defines a discipline as understanding so that one may believe.

As you can see, How big is God? is no trivial question. But how does the question concern a child? What issues are raised when an 8-year-old asks it? At heart I believe the issues raised by the 8-year-old are very close but not exactly the same as the issues raised in the professional essays. Here the common theme concerns the nature of truth. The child in my opinion seeks a further question: Can one, in this day and age, believe in truth itself?.

When a child asks, How big is God?, he or she asks, in a sense, what exactly do we know about God? Or what is the truth of God? It is a question that originates in an innocent belief in the reality of truth. Only one who believes in truth can ask, How big is God? Yet today our children face a new (actually, very old) skepticism. Such skepticism does not have to do with a lack of belief in God but the loss of belief in truth.

Few young adults, for example, believe there is such a thing as truth itself. The line between the reality within the TV or computer screen and the reality outside has become decidedly blurred. Thus, while the nature of truth lies at the heart of the discussion between theologians, scientists, and scholars, an answer to the child must be in the context of today's skepticism about the reality of truth.

Augustine saw clearly that if belief in truth falls by the wayside, so does belief itself. In other words, Christian belief, at least as Roman Catholics understand it, is closely tied to understanding. Augustine never tired of quoting from scripture, "Unless you believe, you will not understand" (Isa. 7:9). Thus, we do not merely believe in God. Such "blind" faith is alien to authentic Christian belief. God, after all, wants us to know and love God. Our belief in God founds our understanding of God.

Although belief and understanding and faith and reason are distinct from one another, they are deeply connected. If atheism attacks the foundations of belief, then skepticism attacks the foundations of understanding. In either case, if either belief or understanding is compromised, then the other is as well. Thus, one must, in the face of today's skepticism, craft an answer to the seemingly simple question, How big is God?, with an eye to helping the child come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of truth itself and the relationship of truth to a belief in God.

Perhaps Augustine's own approach might prove helpful. Augustine, in his books The Master and The Trinity, developed a Christian understanding of the profound Socratic dictum: know thyself. "Know thyself' encouraged one seeking truth to come to the seemingly skeptical conclusion: "I now know that I do not know anything." Yet this is the conclusion that a true believer in truth must come to! For, as Socrates knew, our knowledge of things is constantly changing, but truth itself is eternal and unchanging.

Socrates saw that truth leads not so much to knowing facts (scientia) but to becoming wise (sapientia). Knowing a fact does not change a person--becoming wise does. Knowing a fact can be a cold-blooded act of investigation; becoming wise involves conversion of the self. Such conversion involves the recognition of truth's elusive reality, a humbling of reason before the eternal. Reason so humbled recognizes the need to believe in truth and the hope that one can know the truth.

Such hope, however, can only come if one truly believes that such truth exists. Thus, it is this belief in truth itself that makes the difference between a wise man or woman and simply a man or woman who knows facts. The essence of scientific gathering of facts is doubt. The essence of wisdom is belief.

No wonder, then, that a Christian thinker such as Augustine saw in the Socratic call to know thyself Christ's own reference to himself in the Gospel of John, "I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life" (John 14:6). The restlessness of our hearts is the elusiveness of eternal and divine truth. When we look deep inside our hearts, we find, Augustine would say, someone independent of the self. Such independent reality resists misrepresentation. Our restlessness, our struggle to understand the self, is a witness to the divine reality of truth.

Thus, Augustine would rather lead the skeptic to the interior dimension of the self than to the exterior dimension of nature to convince him or her of the reality of truth. Such an approach to the child's question, I believe, can and ought to be made so that the child's belief in truth is strengthened, even as the answer comes down to one of belief. (See the answer for the child above.)

RELATED ARTICLE: How did God make the trees?

I wish God had left plans that showed us how the trees were made. But that is not God's way. God doesn't need plans to create trees or anything else for that matter. I cannot tell you exactly how God made the trees. Scientists are still trying to figure that out. I'm not sure they will ever know all the details, but what scientists do know is that God didn't use plans to make the trees.

One thing we do know for certain trees are marvelously made. More important, they were made to be beautiful. Even people who do not believe in God will tell you this. We, however, who believe in God can say something more. We can say that God made the trees through the power of tore. It is God's tore that made the trees. It is God's tore that imagined the roots and the trunk and the branches and made them be. It is God's tore that imagined the leaves and the flowers and made them be.

We who believe in God see in the beauty of the trees something of what God had in mind when God made them. We see a tore that tares to share. Trees were made to give shade and coolness on hot summer days. Trees were made to give flowers that make nectar so birds and insects not any have food to eat but they can delight in their feeding. Trees were made to give fruit so that animals and girls and boys could eat, and, tike the birds and insects, not any eat but also delight in the eating. But, most of all, trees were made to be toyed so that we too would learn to love as God loves. How did God make the trees? Lovingly.

RELATED ARTICLE: Can God see me when I go to the bathroom?

Yes, God can see you when you are in the bathroom--but as your own mother sees you. Just as your mother, as the one who gave you life, sees you, so God sees you. Just as your mother as the one who carried you for nine months, whose body gave the raw materials for you to be knit into being, who gave milk from her own body for you to drink, who changed your diapers so you wouldn't have a rash--just as she sees you, so God sees you. More important, God sees you as your mother sees you when she gave you birth. God sees you as your mother sees you after suffering incredible pain to give you life. God also sees you as your mother sees you right after birth holding you in her arms, the pain of birth now forgotten and any tore filling her heart.

God, however, sees even further than your mother does--deep, deep down into your very sour. And what God sees, God likes very, very much because God always finds something very, very good. For there, deeper than you can imagine, lies the very image of God. Yes, God is closer to you than you are to yourself. Sometimes, however, God finds that beautiful image blurred. Sometimes, when God looks deep into your soul, God sees someone who has loved something less worthy than God--someone who could have toyed God with all his or her heart, yet chose to love something less. God, however, can change what God doesn't like. God, like your mother who changed your diapers when they got dirty, can change a troubled soul, but only if you allow yourself to be changed. Yes, God can see you in the bathroom, but God sees you there from the inside out.

RELATED ARTICLE: How big is God?

I wish I had brought a ruler big enough to show you how big God is, but, in a sense, you already have such a ruler. It is inside your heart. Your heart is the ruler by which you can measure how big God is. I know what you're thinking. How can my heart measure how big God is? My heart has no markings for inches or feet. And [ have to agree with you. The heart is no ordinary ruler. It is, however, a very special ruler, It can measure that which cannot be measured. How does one measure what cannot be measured? There is a simple way. First you have to see what you want to measure, then when you try to measure it, you find out that you can't. Your heart is good at that. Your heart tries to measure God all the time, and, more often than not, it finds that it can't. That is why when we ask one question about God it reads to another question. This is your heart trying to measure God. If we would let your heart ask as many questions about God as it wants, there would be no container on earth that could hard them all. Yet, you see, your heart wants to ask the questions. This means your heart can "see" God there inside and wants to know more. Otherwise, your heart would stop asking questions.

This doesn't mean we're stuck only with asking questions. God, above all, wants us to know and tore him. You have, for example, already teamed something. God is bigger than our hearts can measure. Only very wise people know this. By knowing this you, too, have become wise. To be wise is to know that one can learn more from our questions about God than by our answers. Every time your heart asks a question, you have teamed something new. How big is God? As big as your questions.

What tough questions have your kids asked about God? How have you answered them? Ever wonder how a theologian would have answered some of those doozies? Write, fax, or e-mail your children's questions and (if you'd like)your answers to us, and we'll ask Alex Garcia-Rivera to look at them from a theologian's perspective in a future issue. (U.S. CATHOLIC, 205 West Monroe Street, Chicago, Illinois 60606; Fax: [phone]; e-mail: [e-mail].)

ALEX GARCIA-RIVERA is a professor of theology at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California. His most recent book is The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics (Liturgical Press, 1999).