The Unknowing of God

Noreen Mackey

This article was first published in Spirituality March/April 2006. See www.dominicanpublications.com

When we practise prayer seriously, we come to realise that the spiritual journey towards union with God consists in large part of a stripping from us of everything that is not God. It is, of course, God himself who undertakes this work, who strips us of everything to which we are attached, so that empty, light and unencumbered, we are ready finally to be united with him. The poet Francis Thompson described it well.

My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,

And smitten me to my knee;

I am defenceless utterly.

I slept, methinks, and woke,

And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.

We don’t have too much difficulty in understanding the necessity for this process: we are creatures of attachment and we search for the happiness we are destined for in all the wrong places. Things stick to us, even when we know that they are not good for us. They bind us around like Elastoplast, these sticky attachments; they encompass us and take away our freedom. They become our prison: a prison of our own making. But as we journey on in prayer, we notice changes in ourselves, new ways of looking at things, a desire for greater simplicity that makes it easier for us to abandon the luxuries that at one time we thought we could not do without.

There are different kinds of attachment. First, there is that most extreme form of attachment: addiction. We do not have to be people of prayer to recognise that an addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex or anything else is a destroyer of freedom and ultimately of physical life. It is clear to us that we cannot be whole until we are freed from such a deadly attachment. However, it is not so immediately apparent that lesser attachments to material things: to money, to possessions, to food and drink, are slowly killing our inner freedom and life. But when we embark upon a life of serious prayer, we quickly come to see the disorder in these attachments, and it is easy enough for any praying person to understand that they are not compatible with union with God. As God takes a hand and begins to set us free, our life moves into greater simplicity and our overwhelming feeling is of liberation and gratitude. This is the pleasant part of the purifying process!

Other attachments are more subtle; even for the praying person it is not always quite so easy to see that they too are hindrances on our journey. We need the light and guidance of the Holy Spirit to enable us to discern when our love for another person, for example, is no longer love but an imprisoning attachment. And even when we are able to see it, we are often powerless to take any remedial action. Here too the stripping takes place, and in this case it can be – and usually is – bitterly painful. The beloved person may be taken from us by death, by illness, by physical separation, by painful misunderstanding. It is very difficult to go on trusting God in such circumstances, particularly when the person is a spouse or other life partner, or a child. It is hard for us to believe that this is something life-giving. Yet in time, prayer will reveal why it was necessary, will show us the "invisible worm" that had made the rose sick.

More subtle still is our attachment to spiritual things; yet these too can be our prison, locking us up and keeping us from travelling further on the journey to union with God. "That can’t be God’s will!" we protest, when our efforts to do good in our parish or our community are frustrated or made impossible through misunderstanding or poor health, when our efforts to pray meet with dryness and distraction. Sometimes a life choice that we believed to have been wholly for God, such as the choice of the religious life, can be taken from us by our inability to live it out. These are things that are difficult to understand, more difficult still to accept. Yet prayer and reflection in an attitude of openness to God will invariably bring us to the realisation that in some way we had put these choices in the place of God, like the idols the Israelites worshipped in the desert. They are our false gods: we invest our happiness in them rather than in the God to whom they should lead us. And so, in order to be united with him, we must lose our attachment to everything that is not him. That much we can at least grasp.

The real shock comes when we begin to realise that we must lose God himself – we must lose, that is, the God we thought we knew. Because of course, the God we think we know cannot be God as he really is, simply because God is infinite and our finite minds cannot comprehend the Infinite.

Almost all of us will have experienced the loss of our childhood images of God, and this will not have worried us in any way. It happens quite naturally as we grow up, as we begin to pray more and to read the scriptures. As children, we probably had some rather anthropomorphic image of God – a benign old man with a white beard perhaps, or a loving father a bit like our own earthly one, maybe a rather cross teacher ready to pounce on the slightest fault. We grew out of these as we grew out of other childhood images and attachments, and they were replaced with what we considered to be more "adult" images of God: a loving God, or a demanding God or even a vulnerable God. The list is endless and our adult images of God are often drawn from scripture or from other spiritual reading. People who pray, people who take seriously the spiritual life, become much attached to these images. "God is for me a loving God", we often hear people say, for example. They would not want to change that image of him, if asked to do so.

Yet, to say that God is a loving God does not describe God. God is a loving God, yes; we believe that, and indeed Jesus has told us so. But that is not all God is. If it was, he would be limited, and then he would not be God. And so it is that, wishing to be all in all to us, he works away at these attachments too, the attachments to images of him, images which in the end will be just as truly "false gods" as were our addictions, our attachments to money and possessions, to people and places and ways of living. These attachments to our idea of God must also be stripped from us so that we can come to him in his essence, come to him in truth, and so reach the fullness of life and love that he has destined us for. Again, Francis Thompson explains what is happening:

All that I took from thee I did but take

not for thy harms,

but just that thou might’st seek it in my arms.

When the process of the purification of our idea of God begins to take place, it can be deeply unsettling. This is because, unlike the earlier experience of replacing childhood images of God with adult images, this new process consists in stripping away the adult images without putting anything in their place. We must "unlearn" God; we must "unknow" him.

People often become aware for the first time that this most profound spiritual purification is happening when the word "God" ceases to have any meaning for them. They look at it on the page before them, and it simply seems wrong. It suggests nothing to them that coincides in any way with what they experience during prayer. In fact, it suggests nothing at all. It is just a rather odd word. The pronoun "he" also seems wrong in relation to this mysterious being, this Holy One, who we can no longer conceive of as masculine, but then so too does the pronoun "she", for we cannot think of this Entity as feminine either. The neutral word "it" is clearly wrong. Nothing fits anymore. Who or what is it that we are drawn to? Who or what is the Being that we call God? This is the beginning of our unknowing of God, the beginning of the great void that we must face and through which we must travel if we are to come to union with the Most Holy One in this life.

Why must we "unknow" the Divinity in this way? The answer is simple: because we cannot possibly know him.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

So are my ways higher than your ways,

And my thoughts than your thoughts.

and

For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counsellor?

In order to approach the Holy One who is the essence of truth, we must abandon everything that is not the truth. Nothing that we can imagine can be anything like God. No matter what our image of him is, no matter what the word "God" may have suggested to us, it cannot be the truth. And if it is not true, then the nearer we approach to the Holy One the greater the hindrance our idea of God will be. That is why we must lose it.

But because nothing comes to replace the old images, we are face to face with nothing, with a void – with the Void. This is a terrifying place to be, because it seems to strike at the very heart of our faith. It can seem indeed, at first, to be the very negation of faith. Is there, then, nothing? Is that what we have been journeying towards? Is that what all our yearning has been leading us to? Nothing?

The answer is literally "yes", because the Most Holy is not any thing that has been created. Therefore, in the most literal sense he is No Thing – nothing. And yet, there is a paradox here, as there is in so many of the things of God. For although the Holy One can truly be said to be No Thing, he is also All, the Beginning and the End, Alpha and Omega. We cannot understand this until we have faced that Void, entered it and crossed it. For it is the testing place of our trust in God, the place where we can say with Job "Even if he slay me I will trust him."

But where can we ever find the courage and the faith to bring ourselves to the point of such a heroic act of trust? How can we enter the Void, once we have come face to face with it? The answer is the same as the answer to that other great question: "Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Jesus Christ, our Lord, says St Paul, answering this question.

Jesus. When one has come to this truly terrifying place on the journey, when one has at last fully realised that the Divinity is totally incomprehensible, utterly Other, then the though and name of Jesus comes to us as comfortingly and as familiarly as a warm fire in the middle of winter. Jesus is our Way through the void, the only one of our kind to have truly known the Most Holy One. Jesus is our Truth, in this bleak desert where we have lost all our half-truths. Jesus is our Life, in what may seem to us to be the valley of death.

It is my Father who glorifies me, he of whom you say. "He is our God", though you do not know him. But I know him: if I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you. But I do know him and I keep his word.

We will probably only begin to realise the gift God has given us in Jesus when we reach this lonely and fearful place where only Jesus is still recognisable. In the darkness of the night of our unknowing of God, Jesus is there with us as our light. He, a human being who nevertheless is God, comes to tell us out of his own experience that we have nothing to fear, that the very hairs of our head are numbered, that we can walk without fear across a void that will bring us to our heart’s desire. He tells us that he is with us, that he will never leave us alone. He tells us that he wants us to be with him where he is, with the Father, with the Holy One. He tells us that we can trust him, because everything he says he has first heard from his Father.

This time of our unknowing of God is the time for us to take up the Gospels and to seek to know Jesus more and more deeply. An attachment to Jesus is the one attachment that cannot hurt us and that will not be taken from us. We can count on that, for we have the word of the Most Holy on it:

This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!

There is no need for us to be afraid. There is no need for us to begin to imagine that we have lost our faith. When thoughts like these come (and they will) then we must think of Jesus. We must turn to him – for he is alive – and tell him how we feel. He understands, he is like us in everything except sin. He knows what fear is. He knows what the apparent loss of God feels like. Remember his cry on the cross – My God, why have you forsaken me? He knows what it is to be human, but he also knows what it is to be Divine, and that is why he is the bridge across the Void, the bridge to the Father, to the Holy One with whom he lives and reigns in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for ever.