This article was written by Rev. Al Rodriguez, former rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church and Executive Director of El Buen Samaritano. Rev. Rodriguez is currently an adjunct professor at the Seminary of the Southwest and fellow with the Fellowship Program of the Episcopal Church Foundation, which awarded a grant for his American Latino Episcopal Outreach (ALEO) project.

The notion of God being “too big” to understand was passed on to me by my father who, ironically, was a non-church goer. At best he was a deist who had fallen away from his Roman Catholic beginnings. I remember him saying in Spanish, “Mijito, Dios es muy grande para entender.” In fact, this was probably the only religious instruction he ever taught me during my growing up years in the “Westside” of San Antonio. But, he planted a seed.

The Westside is the area of town where many Mexicans and Mexican American families live and it was my entire world. In those growing up days I saw the world through the lens of the Mexican culture. From a religious standpoint, there were the “Católicos y los aleluyias,” the latter being anybody who wasn’t Roman Catholic. Later as I moved away from this cultural and religious cocoon, I began to learn that reality is really seen through a prism rather than a singular lens. It was then that my father’s notion that God is too big to understand began to take on a new meaning.

I’m not the scientific type, but I have always been fascinated by how a prism works.  I’m referring to an octagonal glass prism that can separate a beam of white light into a spectrum of colors, similar to that of a rainbow. It was proven long ago that a white beam of light hitting such a prism already contains the constituent array of colors, and it is the glass prism that refracts the variety of colors that are dispersed at various angles.

Now, I’m sure that my simple explanation does not even begin to meet a rigorous scientific description of how the various and different prims work. But what does work for me is thinking of a prism as a metaphor for God’s Light beaming on the whole of humanity which refracts and disperses God’s Truth and reality in all of God’s different colors and angles. Thus, depending on where we stand we discern God’s Light from different angles and see God in different shades of color. Therefore it takes all of humanity and the array of the great religious traditions to see the totality of God’s Light. God, indeed, is too big to understand until we combine God’s Truth through our colorful array of different religious traditions. We might say that it takes a whole village to see who God is.

This means that we have to keep open the channels of intercultural and inter-traditional dialogue and interaction so we’re able to understand and appreciate the various angles and colors of God. In effect, if iACT did not exist, we would have to invent such a body in order to see all of God’s coloration coming together.

To learn more about iACT’s The Red Bench: Interfaith Conversations that Matter, visit interfaithtexas.org/rb. We encourage you to sign up for our mailing list for updates on this and our other impactful programs.