Discovering God

THE OLDER we get, the more we realise that things are often not what they appear to be on the surface. This is abundantly true of human beings for ‘whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.’ William James
This is also true of the physical world where appearances often conceal deeper and even contradictory realities. You might, for example, be standing or sitting still whereas the train you are on is travelling at great speed Einstein helped us to understand that the notion of absolute space or time was meaningless and to merge them both in a single four-dimensional entity he called ‘space-time’ in which everything moves at the speed of light. It is within this reality that energy is converted into mass and mass into energy, thus forming the universe.
One of the consequences of this is that we should not be hasty in judging either things or people. The opinions we form need to be continually tested and retested against an ever-changing reality. We should not allow ourselves to be led just by our senses or feelings.
Considerations such as these affect our image of God whose creative power formed such a universe. Yet this should not make God unintelligible. Though as limited human beings we cannot expect fully to understand the divine nature, we not only have the definition given to Moses – ‘I am who am’ – which leaves us with a God who is divinely mysterious; but another definition, from St John; ‘God is love’.
The very essence of God’s nature is not a mystery of isolation or individualism but of sharing, of mutual outpouring, of giving and receiving. The exchange of love between Father and Son is what Jesus called the Holy Spirit, the spirit of love. And it is because of this love that we and everything else in the universe exists.
We were loved into existence by God in order to love. Our whole purpose in life is to learn what love is or, better put, to learn how to love. This is why we are in the world, and if we miss out on this, whatever else we might learn, whatever else we might do or achieve, we have missed out on the most important thing of all. This is what Jesus described to Martha as ‘the one thing’ necessary. Luke 10:42
God’s love consists in a total gift of self and we can only share in this, which is the purpose of our existence, when we too are able to give ourselves totally. Yet we are all born with a love that is profoundly selfish, turned in on self. And it is no easy task to rid ourselves of this selfishness we all have. In fact the whole of our life can be seen as a long gradual struggle to achieve a love that is ever more selfless, more geared towards the other.
Our innate self-centredness makes this a difficult task. Yet the more we give and go out to others, the more we ourselves receive and the richer our life becomes. As Jesus taught, ‘Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.’ Luke 17:33 If we gradually die to our selfishness, we become more alive to others and in God
This union with God we call heaven, involves a total going out of oneself, the meaning of the word ecstasy. Love is indeed ‘ecstasy’, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication like falling in love, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God. Deus Caritas Est, n.6 000000
Peter Knott SJ