Loving A Hidden God
INTRODUCTION
Any examination of our spiritual life must begin with the fact that all of us want to be happy. We are all driven by the desire to have all our thirsts perfectly satisfied, all our emptiness filled up. We are never confused about the fact that we want to be happy. Confusion arises only when we try to determine what will make us happy. Still, there are some things that seem beyond doubt. Most of us would agree that we want a healthy vibrant life. We want that life to have some meaning, some importance in the scheme of things. We want a life in which we find another to love and in which that beloved returns our love. Finally, we want to have the freedom to control our destiny. We want all of these great goods to the fullest extent possible and, once possessed, we want never to lose them.
It is obvious that we don't possess such goods perfectly just now. To whatever degree we do have them, we could always have a bit more. At very least they could be more permanent. But they are not. Health and vitality come and go. My youthful shape has become shapeless. The work or life-situation which has brought meaning to my life will someday end. I will retire and no one will complain. Or perhaps I will die in the full bloom of my career only to find (as I look back from eternity) that my "boots" have been filled with younger and more adroit feet. The earthly loves that brought me true moments of ecstasy, will not be by my side forever on this earth. Some of my loves will die before me; some will simply wander away to a life where I am no longer that important. And, as regards my "freedom", where on this earth can I find a time or place where the direction of my life is not to some extent determined by others? In any case, however much of these goods I may possess in life, they all must end at death and this somber truth must dampen my joy of earthly possessions to some extent. Indeed, the anxiety we experience as all of us search for happiness is precisely this: we live a finite life with a thirst for the infinite. We want to possess "all good" and we want to possess it forever. We want to permanently possess that unlimited good, that infinite good, that we call God.
It is this love for good not yet possessed that drives us through life. In the words of Augustine:
My love is my weight: wherever I go my love is what brings me there.
Confessions, 13.9.10.
Love is complex. It is fundamentally an act of will, a decision or choice, but it depends on two other elements: knowledge and delight. We must delight in an object before we are drawn to choose it, but we cannot delight in something that we do not know. Without knowledge of and delight in an object we will not distinguish it as a good to be loved; and, if we have no love for it, we will seek to be united to it.
This is the principal problem in trying to love God. God is a hidden god. Most of us have had no direct experience of God and for those few great mystics who seem to have had such experience it was mostly only for an instant and often was followed by a "dark night of the soul" in which God seemed farther away than ever. I daresay that most of us "ordinary folk" have never had such a "dark night" because our lives are too dim and dull. We live shadowed lives rather than lives of alternating brilliance and gloom. Most of us are just too unfocused, too busy, too distracted to climb the mountain of contemplation, there to wait for the grace of God to lift us higher. Just now we see God only by faith, "through a glass darkly."
It is not surprising that our knowledge of God should be so obscured. We have direct experience only of ourselves and even here such awareness is sometimes confused by the fictions we create about our self. We may think we have direct experience of other human beings but we know them only through the images of their outer selves that we create in our mind. We cannot see their inner selves, that spiritual core that makes them the person they truly are. We believe them rather than know them, trusting in what they say of themselves. Thus, when another says "I love you" we do not see the love that they have in their hearts but we suppose that it is there because of their testimony or we suspect that it is there because of their actions towards us. Such knowledge of those we love is not very satisfying knowledge but it is the best we can do. We would like to have face to face contact at least with our loved ones in this life and even with God but such perfect knowledge is unlikely if not impossible. If we are a mystery to ourselves, others are even greater mysteries. As has been suggested, few have a mystical experience of God; perhaps fewer still have a mystical experience of others.
We are promised that in heaven we will possess the infinite good that we so desperately desire, a face to face contact and intimate union with God. We may well wonder how this can be accomplished. A union is not created by simply standing before someone we love and looking at them. This is not union; it just being present to each other. Nor is the union we seek accomplished by being consumed by the other, like the incompetent hunter who becomes one with his prey by being eaten by it. For a lover to be "eaten alive" by their love is not captivating; it is simply destructive. We become truly united with our loves when we become "one heart" with them. We become truly united with God when he becomes so powerfully present in our self that our face to face contact with self will also be a face to face contact with him. But this is not likely to happen, at least for very long, in this life. We are still too imperfect. We are still too blind to see even the blazing Son of God.
Indeed, the paradox of our lives is that we want union with a God whom we cannot see. As a result our most important task in this life comes down to this: to discover and love a hidden God. But we don't know how to go about it. Not even Augustine knew how, at least for the first 30 years of his life. From his earliest days he knew that he wanted to be happy, but it was not until he read the Hortensius of Cicero that he began to see that happiness demanded more than physical satisfaction and earthly success. Cicero's book revealed to him that there was a good beyond the passing things of earth that would finally give the answers to the mysteries of life, that would finally bring satisfaction to his wandering spirit. Cicero called it "wisdom"; Augustine came to realize that it was nothing less than the infinite good that is God.
The problem was how to achieve such union with the divine? Through his reading of sacred scripture Augustine came to realize that the stages leading to discovery and love for the yet hidden God were the so-called "Gifts of the Holy Ghost" which had been suggested by the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament. (Is 11: 2-3) The first gift, Fear of the Lord stood for the darkness in which every person's journey begins. Piety is the next stage of quiet listening for some direction on how to proceed. Through the gift of knowledge we finally begin to discover who we are and what we need to do to move on. Such beginning awareness of ourselves and the world reveals the imperfections and difficulty in earthly life and leads to the need for the next gift, the fortitude to continue our journey. In our confusion we are guided by the gift of counsel which tells us the perfect our love of others especially by forgiving them. If our love is perfected we can then rise to the next step of purification where we purge ourselves of any remaining attachment to this world. Finally, we come to the end of our journey, the stage of wisdom where we finally come to love the God we as yet cannot see perfectly.
The reflections that follow offer some thoughts on each of these steps in the journey to see, love, and possess this hidden God. Even now the following seems clear:
1. Experience testifies that the trip is not likely to be in a straight line. Even for one who (like St. Thérèse of Lisieux) seems to have reached the last stage of the journey, it is still possible to fall back into the darkness that was its beginning. Even when one achieves some union with God in this life, there still will be a need for pious listening, prayerful knowledge, and bravery. Even when filled with love of God there will still be need to observe the counsel of mercy towards other and to seek more self-purification.
2. The experience of any of the gifts of the Holy Ghost is a sign that God is already present to us. How else to explain our sometimes miraculous victory over despair in our darkness? How else to explain our sometimes extraordinary brave efforts to survive our tragedies, to overcome our addictions, to conquer our weakness? It is simply impossible for us to make the steep climb to the heavenly vision of God that is wisdom without the support of uplifting grace illuminating the mind and strengthening the will at every step.
I do not believe that I am being a pessimist (only a realist) in making the following humble prediction. I doubt that I (and perhaps you) in the pursuit of the hidden God in this life will ever get much beyond the gift of Counsel, doing our best to show mercy and love for the neighbor that we can see. This side of death, I doubt that I (and perhaps you) will ever achieve that glorious Purification of self that prepares for the vision of God that is Wisdom. Although I believe in God and even have had some sort of an awareness of the divine in my life (especially through my human loves), I must acknowledge I have yet to experience the ecstasy that some great saints seem to have achieved. As I continue my journey through life, I must accept the dispiriting prospect that the God I pursue will remain mostly hidden.
What then must I do? Augustine answers:
How should we train ourselves? In love for human beings. You can say to me, "I have not seen God." Can you say to me, "I have not seen a human being?" Love each other! If you love the human whom you see, you will love God too at the same time; for you will see love itself, the love that is the God who dwells within each of us.
Commentary on the Epistle of John, 5.7.2.
The consoling message of scripture and Christian tradition is that this is enough for eventual salvation, that though God remains hidden from me, I at least can be sure that I am moving towards eventual union if I try my best to have a healthy love for my "self" and an unselfish love for other humans. This is the clear meaning of the words of the apostle John:
The way we can be sure of our knowledge of him (God) is to keep his commandments. The man who claims, "I have known him," without keeping the commandments is a liar; in such a one there is no truth. But whoever keeps his word, truly has the love of God been made perfect in him. The way we can be sure we are in union with him is for the one who claims to abide in him to conduct himself just as he did.
1 John 2: 3-6
Long after, Augustine told much the same thing to his friends. He consoled them with the truth that it is simply impossible to truly love another human being (no easy task in itself) without loving Christ, without loving God. Augustine says:
If you love your neighbor do you perhaps love them and not love Christ? How can this be since you love Christ's members? Therefore, when you love Christ's members, you love Christ. When you love Christ, you love the Son of God. When you love the Son of God, you love the Father also.
Commentary on the First Epistle of John, 10.3.2.
With this encouraging message we can begin our attempt to understand the various stages of our journey to discover and finally possess the hidden God. It will not be an easy voyage but at least we will not be alone. We share the trip with the whole human race; and, best of all, God will always be with us ... with us both in our times of despairing darkness and in our times of hope-filled ecstasy.