Mystery is a Beckoning Word

Knowing God

One evening a grandfather took his little son fishing.  The little boy started asking all the questions that a young child will ask.  Where does the sun go when it goes down?  Do the fish feel the hook when they are caught?  Why do they eat worms when they could eat something much nicer?  His grandfather did his best to answer all his questions and then told him that he could only ask one more question.  The little boy thought for a long while and at last he said, “Did you ever see God?”  The old man looked up at the evening sky as the sun melted away into crimson, yellow and orange and he looked at his little grandchild whom he loved so very much and he said, “Nowadays son, it seems as though I see nothing else but God.”

To know God is the perennial quest of all the major world religions.  Judaism honours the God who is One, who cannot be seen and whose back only Moses was blessed to glimpse.  Islam worships the God who is great, who is uniquely God and whose prophet is Muhammad.  Christians seek to know the God who has made himself known to the world in a unique way in Jesus Christ.   There are those too, who though they do not belong to a particular faith tradition, strive to know God after their own fashion.  It is the ultimate question all of us ask at some stage – “Is there a God and how can I come to know this God?”

In the tradition of Christianity theologians and mystics have sought to explore and express the implications of such questions.  Holy people of great mind and intellect have struggled to show that it is possible for us to have knowledge of God albeit that we ‘see through a glass’ darkly, as St. Paul puts it.   Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of all theologians, assures us that we can know God through God’s effects – creation and the whole realm of being, but direct knowledge of God will only be possible after death, when we are caught up in the mystery of the beatific vision i.e. we will see God face to face.  Aquinas tells us that we cannot say what God is, only what God is not. Anything we attribute to God – God is more not like that than he is like that.  When we speak of God we use language in an analogous way – when we say God is Love or God is compassionate, we speak of love and compassion but not as we know them in the finite (limited?) experience of mere creatures.

In recent times a rediscovery of the lives and insights of the mystics has been taking place.   We hear and read about courses such as ‘the way of the mystic’ or ‘the mystical journey’.  Some of these men and women are familiar to us – St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of Liseux and Julian of Norwich.   Each of these great mystics describes their attempt to know and love God as the goal of their whole lives.  There is a kind of knowledge of God which is possible through religious or mystical experience.  This is always a grace or a gift of God and cannot be manufactured or produced by human effort. 

There are other mystics, lesser known to popular devotion, who nonetheless have had an enormous effect on western mysticism and the effort to acquire knowledge of God. Pseudo-Dionysius is one such figure.  Writings by this mysterious contemplative have shaped and formed the Christian mystical understanding in a manner unsurpassed by any other of the great mystics.  Leaving questions of his identity aside, it was Pseudo Dionysius that introduced the idea of ‘dark knowledge’ of God or more commonly, the apophatic way.  Also known as negative theology or the way of unknowing, this approach teaches that knowledge and experience of God is to be sought by putting aside all images, ideas, concepts and systems of theological explanation so that one can come to God in a state of  greatest poverty and openness to the Mystery that is God.   The English author of The Cloud of Unknowing, the German Dominican Meister Eckhart and the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross are some examples of this tradition.

On the other hand there are mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila and Walter Hilton who represent the kataphatic approach.  This entails an active pursuit of knowledge of God through structured prayer and a sense of the familiarity and nearness of God.  Walter Hilton wrote, “Do you want to find your Lord and God?  Then go down to the hospitals, to the sick and bedridden and there you will find him.”

People today have become more open to the possibility of religious experience.  There is even a ‘laboratory’ or study centre for religious experience in Wales.  In the present religious climate we tend to reflect more on our own personal experience and to value it.   We have moved from the experience of authority to the authority of experience.  It is possible to believe that there is a ‘mysticism’ that is accessible to all and not available only to particular special individuals.  There are always problems and difficulties with the way mystics use language.  We are normally accustomed to using language in an ‘informational’ way – to convey knowledge and accurate observation. The mystics use language in a ‘transformational’ way.  This means that they are trying to give the reader a taste or a flavour – an actual experience, albeit limited - of what they have experienced which very often goes beyond normal elucidation and again, draws us into the Mystery of God.

The ability to see God in all things as the grandfather in the opening story had acquired, is something we can grow into with the passing of the years.  It is what often convinces people that there must be a God – “…that all of this could not have come about simply by chance”.  Others prefer to express the intimacy and the inextricable loving presence of God in all creation as “God seeing all things through us.”    This can help us to remember that there is a knowledge that comes from love which opens up all kinds of new horizons to us and beckons us ever deeper into the mystery that is God.