From “Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation” by Parker J. Palmer
The God I know does not ask us to conform to some abstract norm for the ideal self. God asks us only to honor our created nature, which means our limits as well as potentials. When we fail to do so, reality happens – God happens – and way closes behind us.
The God I was told about in church, and still hear about from time to time, runs about like an anxious schoolmaster measuring people’s behavior with a moral yardstick. But the God I know is the source of reality rather than morality, the source of what is rather than what ought to be. This does not mean that God has nothing to do with morality: morality and its consequences are built into the God-given structure of reality itself. Moral norms are not something we have to stretch for, and moral consequences are not something we have to wait for: they are right here, right now, waiting for us to honor, or violate, the nature of self, other, world.