Get “behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” [Mk 8:33]. In rebuking Peter, Jesus makes the point that God is beyond our understanding, beyond our knowing; it is not for us to question God, for we are His creatures, created in His image to love and to serve Him.
In the beginning, after man and woman ate of the forbidden fruit, “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves” [Gn 3:7].
In the beginning – before the beginning – God in His perfection created angels, archetype of the soul, immortal spirits “stamped with the seal of perfection, of complete wisdom and perfect beauty” [Ez 28:12]. God who is all good and beyond all perfection, brought them into existence and gave them gifts beyond imagining and placed them on His holy mountain, “in Eden, the garden of God” [Ez 28:13]. And the first of these was the morning star, Lucifer, son of the dawn.
In describing how we can know how near we are to the Kingdom of God, Meister Eckhart tells us “If I were a king, and did not know it, I should not really be a king. But, if I were fully convinced that I was a king, and all of mankind coincided in my belief, and I knew that they shared my conviction, I should indeed be a king, and all the wealth of the king would be mine. But, if one of these three conditions were lacking, I should not really be a king.”
Today, more so than at any time in the long history of man, there are those who have convinced themselves that God is knowable and that to understand the nature and composition of God all one must do is delve deeper to fully comprehend truth in the absolute. Such arrogance and conceit in the minds of the created know few bounds; surely God enjoys the encounter with such foolishness, recognizing the futility in such endeavors and the realization that the joke is completely lost on the unwise.
Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth century Benedictine nun and mystic, beautifully describes God’s presence this way: “We are in God and God whom we do not see is in us.”
Every soul is a song, an anthem to the wonder and majesty of God; infinite melodies in prayer to the One that caused us all to become. When it comes to communicating with Almighty God we often develop severe stage fright, stuttering and stammering, suddenly finding ourselves incapable of expressing the simplest coherent thought. We are beggars, seeking His grace, forgiveness, love, mercy, embrace, help, guidance, any number of untold favors or requests, and our unworthiness keeps us at a distance from Him. But as someone once said “God understands our prayers even when we cannot find the words to say them.”
We live in the age of the ‘sound bite’, the ‘tweet’, the ‘instant message’. Our willingness to eschew greater understanding and deeper knowledge for instantaneous gratification are stark reminders of our growing acceptance and decline into mediocrity and mindlessness. We are in danger of losing ourselves and our souls in the vacuousness of non-thinking. Rene’ Descartes’ philosophical proposition ‘cogito ergo sum’ or ‘I think, therefore I am’ is fast becoming ‘cogito non ergo sum non’ or ‘I think not, therefore I am not.’
There is a certain rhythm and flow to every life, unique unto itself; every measured beat differs from the one that came before, and only God can play its melody. It is our own arrogance and conceit that fills us, fills us with everything but God, and propels us to create God in our own image. We cry out in wonder and mystery that God has forsaken us, abandoned us when we need Him most. But has He?
