God of Surprises, which I first encountered in the novitiate. My own idea of God at the time was limited to God the Far-Away One, so it was liberating to hear about a God who surprises, who waits for us with wonderful things. It’s a playful, even fun, image of God. But I would have never come up with it on my own. It came to me from David Donovan, my spiritual director, who had read it in a book of that same title, by an English Jesuit named Gerard W. Hughes, who borrowed it from an essay by the German Jesuit Karl Rahner.
