“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the single most important thing about us,” wrote A.W. Tozer. I tend to agree.

Unlike the often-discussed question of whether God exists, which I confess has never vexed me all that much, I find the question of what God is like to be endlessly fascinating.

On one hand, the word God is the most complex word in human language. It must be this way, if we are to remain true to our faith’s earliest creeds. Take for instance 1 Timothy 6:16, which says “God dwells in unapproachable light” or St. Augustine’s famous quip which, although uttered several centuries post-canon, is still undeniably salient: si enim comprehendis, non est Deus (If we understand, it is not God).

I have certainly had to come to terms with my own dangerously reductionist conceptualizations of God. At varying stages of my life, God has been both the anthropomorphized and static ‘Man in the Sky,’ as well as the vague, blanketing benign force that just wants us all to link arms and sing Kum Ba Yah. Both caricatures seem to be equally widespread–and equally unhelpful.

What is perhaps most unsettling is that we are all tempted to reductionism in our understanding of God. Anne Lamott once said we can safely assume we’ve created God in our own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people we do. Whether we are liberals, conservatives, or moderates, all of us have people we disagree with. How can we resist the temptation to reduce God into a Rorshachian construct of our unhealed selves?

The pitfalls in finding a true conceptualization of God are insidious and vast, but the answer is hardly to wither in a respectable apathy. In the book Miracles, C.S. Lewis wrote about a girl who was brought up to believe in God as a benign sort of perfect substance, but as an adult found that this had actually led her to think of God as something like a vast tapioca and, as Lewis puts it, “to make matters worse, she disliked tapioca.”

God may be inscrutable, but if we seek him with our whole hearts we will find him. This also, thanks to the ancient prophet Jeremiah of Anathoth, is found in our canon.

How can we know God intimately while also holding God as a profound and never-ending mystery? I don’t know, but I think the brilliant, if opium-fueled words of Francis Thompson provide a starting point: “Oh world unknowable we know thee/inapprehensible we clutch thee.” That is probably where I will have to leave it for today.