Mind tricks

After the death of his beloved wife "H.," C.S. Lewis began to notice a disturbing phenomenon with respect to his memory of her:

…I am thinking about her nearly always. Thinking of the H. facts --- real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan't). But won't the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me. ( A Grief Observed)

I have noticed the same phenomenon with respect to my thoughts of God. When I drift away from close daily intimacy with him in his Word, I begin, ever so subtly, to reconstruct him in my own image. This process begins to happen some time before I realize it, of course, when I am still convinced that I know exactly who God is. It's only when I come back to the Bible that I realize how dangerously close I had come to constructing an idol --- a god made to look and sound like the desires and opinions of Andree Seu.

Lewis continues like this: "The most precious gift that marriage [let me substitute "adoption in Christ"] gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant --- in a word, real."