Of all the catechism questions and answers I had to memorize as a child, one always sticks in my head:
Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with him forever in heaven.
Although I got tired of going to catechism classes and religious instruction by the time I was 11 or 12, I never really got tired of trying to know God.
In college philosophy courses, it was a sort of background issue that really drew me. I wanted to learn more.
Seminary theology courses exposed me to some of the classic speculations about God, His purposes, His will, and His actions—but I never seemed to get to know God very well or enough.
Maybe because getting to “know” God is not about information and speculation.
Theologians often seem to study God in an abstract way, unlike the way Physicists study matter and energy, Biologists study living organisms, and Cosmologists study the universe.
Theology gives us a lot of sophisticated concepts, but not that much real understanding—for example, Trinity, Processions, Incarnation, Hypostatic Union, and Transubstantiation.
It’s as though we keep circling around a mystery, the unknown and ultimately incomprehensible, tightening and narrowing its boundaries—and then give the core mystery a name, and act as though this name was a solution!
Historically, Western Theologians seemed to have been more engrossed in this than Eastern—some of whom saw the whole exercise as futile.
Let’s look at it from another point of view.
In Luke’s Gospel, when Gabriel announces to Mary that she will be the mother of the Messiah, she questions this, saying, “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” (Lk 1:34, in the King James version).
Here, “know” doesn’t refer to abstract knowledge but to an intimacy of relations between a man and woman. We hardly ever use the word, “know”, in that sense anymore; we’re more likely to use the word, “love”.
Now, with this point of view, “knowing” God becomes an entirely different matter. It’s not just a matter of the head, but of the heart.
We can’t intellectually plunge the depths of our Creator, for that’s a vain and pretentious quest, entirely beyond our capacities.
But, we can celebrate the intimacy with God that is the essence of our lives—“for in him we love and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
We can also do everything possible to deepen this intimacy of relations with God, who made us, who is the dynamism and root of our lives, who sustains us, guides us, inspires us, loves us, and calls us to a fullness of life beyond our imagining.
When we say “to know Him, to love Him”, I think we mean almost the same thing. The challenge is trust—to entrust myself to God without reserve, day by day, all through my life and especially in that last leap of trust we call death.
9 February 2020