The God of the Gifted Child
There’s a brilliant book by Alice Miller I’ve recently re-read. It’s called The Drama of the Gifted Child. The title doesn’t really explain what the book is about… the premise is that some of us grew up with parents — who for reasons of their own — were not attuned to us properly when we were children. As a consequence, we did not have had a childhood in which we were aided in understanding our emotions and our experience of reality. Instead of having our experience of the world mirrored and explained, we were put in the role of mirroring and explaining our parent’s experience of the world to them.
I want to weave this into a theory espoused by the famed psychologist Carl Jung. He said that maybe God doesn’t have an experience of the world without humanity to teach God about it. In other words, God can only have a first-hand experience of the world when we experience the world and inform God of it by our being present to it.
The Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic Saint, Teresa of Ávila says:
Jesus has no body but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks….
The prayers goes on, but the idea I’m pushing here is that God needs us to reflect the world back. Maybe God needs us the way a child needs an adult to mirror and explain the world?
Maybe God can only be conscious of the world when we are aware and reflecting the world back? Maybe that is what the Biblical text meant when it said that humanity was created in the image of the divine?
I view my experience of reality as a sacred duty. I can see that my being alive and present to the world around me is my religious calling. It is in my experience of this world that I bring God more into this world.
I know living “out loud” isn’t the norm. Do it anyway. I know being emotional present is vulnerable and not very comfortable. Do it anyway.
Live every emotion and every experience fully and as a way to reflect back to the world to everyone with whom you interact with on a daily basis. You’ll be acting as God as you do so.
This week’s #wisdom_biscuit:
Bring more God in the world, live fully.
Rabbi Brian Doesn’t Understand
August 10, 2026
In the 18th century, in Hannipol, a small district of Khmelnytskyi Oblast, in present-day western Ukraine, there was a rabbi known as Reb Zusya. Zusya, a pious man, taught about humility and had a strange habit of referring to himself in the third person. Instead of saying, “I am hungry,” or “I don’t understand,” he would say, “Zusya is hungry,”
