Mister God this is Anna

Mister God this is Anna

By Life Positive

November 2007

This much-loved book by “fynn” shares uncommon commonsense on how to worship god

Mum and Anna shared many likes and dislikes; perhaps the simplest and the most beautiful sharing was their attitude toward Mister God. Most people I knew used God as an excuse for their failure: ‘He should have done this,’ or ‘Why has God done this to me?’ But with Mum and Anna difficulties and adversities were mere occasions for doing something. Ugliness was the chance to make beautiful. Sadness was the chance to make glad. Mister God was always available to them. A stranger would have been excused for believing that Mister God lived with us, but then Mum and Anna believed he did. Very rarely did any conversation exclude Mister God in some way or other.

After the evening meal was finished and all the bits and pieces put away Anna and I would settle down to some activity, generally of her choosing. Fairy stories were dismissed as mere pretend stories; living was real and living was interesting, and by and large, fun. Reading the Bible wasn’t a great success. She tended to regard it as a primer, strictly for the infants. The message of the Bible was simple and any half wit could grasp it in thirty minutes flat! Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things. Once you had got the message there wasn’t much point of going over and over again on the same old ground. Our local parson was taken aback when he asked her about God. The conversation went as follows:
‘Do you believe in God?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know what God is?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is God then?’
‘He’s God!’
‘Do you go to church?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I know it all!’
‘What do you know?’
‘I know to love Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and trees’– and the catalogue went on – ‘with all of me’.

… Anna had bypassed all the non essentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence: ‘And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don’t forget to love yourself.’

The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The idea of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with Mister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn’t everywhere, he wasn’t anywhere. For her, churchgoing and ‘Mister God’ talks had no necessary connection. For her, the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message when you were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn’t got the message or didn’t understand it or it was ‘Just for swank’.