Contemplating God

In an aggressively secular society, it is easy for a believer in God to feel threatened and insecure. Is God really there when so many people deny His existence? Is my faith based on a delusion, or a logical error?

Our anxieties about God do not concern only His existence. We all go through our spiritual dry patches. And in those patches, our life's mysteries and queries become one with the God-question.

In his Confessions, St Augustine tells the tale of his search for God. But for him, what had seemed a great and noble journey to find God was, as he himself says, a series of delays and postponements. His story today is a warning to us all who live in a world of spiritual confusion no less disorienting than his.

In his relationship with God, man is not only dealing with the reflections of his own consciousness; rather he is reaching out beyond himself to encounter God. Worship and prayer are not only possible, but are a postulate of the being of man who is open to God.

The doctrine of the Trinity did not arise out of speculation about God. It is the expression of the historical side of God and therefore of the way in which God appears in history.

As it comes to us, the teaching of the Church on the Trinity formulated in the fourth century remains content with a mystery that cannot be plumbed by man. We can only speak rightly about God if we renounce the attempt to comprehend and let Him be the uncomprehended.

But to our minds today this is unacceptable. The modern mind wants to believe and make believe that there is nothing unexplainable under the sun. Ours today is a search for certainty and power; we want firm ground beneath our feet; we want to master everything intellectually.

But there are in life things we cannot explain but which we can understand. The search for understanding is an endless search. Whoever you are, and however wise and learned you may be, there is always infinitely more that you might try to understand.

Today's readings are an invitation in this sense: to let our lives be touched by wisdom and love in the first place, in order then to come to the truth. Our search for God is a journey of the mind and heart that intertwine.

The Gospel is an invitation to let go because, as Jesus says, "it would be too much for us now". This is not Jesus saying: "You're still undergraduates and this is heavy stuff for you!" It is the Spirit of truth who "will lead us to the complete truth". A truth that is not speculative or doctrinal, but the truth of wholeness and holiness, the truth that dispels doubt and darkness.

It is the truth that comes mainly from contemplation of the mystery of God. Almost all mystics claim that they are not writing for clever people, but this does not mean that theirs is the voice of a simple, unlettered piety.

When they dissociate themselves from the academic world of their time, they are making the time-honoured mystical point that Wordsworth's "meddling intellect" has nothing to do with the vision of God.

I remember once reading that a world without God, atheism, was only the outcome of a God without a world. Often in our catechism lessons and even in our theologies, God-talk ended up being almost futile intellectual disquisitions trying to explain what from the outset was declared to be an unfathomable mystery.

John Henry Newman's ability to combine syllogism with sentiment is remarkable and can still help us navigate through today's jungle of spiritual choices. We cannot move through the spiritual life the way we drift through the marketplace.