KNOWING GOD

There are times in my life when I try to remove every thought from my head, rid myself of every distraction and simply concentrate on God. Those times are always few and far between, and always, always, always fleeting. I try in my imagining to grab hold of God, the concept of God out there somewhere before anything and everything began. I get that far and then get stopped dead in my tracks when I ask myself how God got there. I have no answer for that and so I quickly move on to whatever was occupying my mind before I foolishly thought about thinking about God.

And yet, even though I cannot even in the slightest way imagine who God is, how God is or anything about God that might be intellectually satisfactory, I still believe in God. There are those, we call themselves atheists, who will say that I am foolish. “Why put any faith in a being you have no way of understanding,” they would ask. “Just move on and deal with the reality that you can prove exists instead of wasting your time on some being who cannot be proved?” they would argue.

I would have no logical response but only a faith response; and that would be that I simply believe in God even if there is no possible way that I can know for certain that my God exists, Even more, there is no way I can prove that my God loves me unconditionally, created and still creates everything that was and is and will be or that my God always forgives me even when I do not deserve to be forgiven. I simply believe all that and more and do not need proof that any or all of it is true.

Father Ron Rolheiser says that we believers know God as a light so bright that the light is perceived as darkness. In other words, God so overwhelms us with what we can see and perceive that we become blinded by the light of it all. We end up seeing only darkness when we want to see God and so we give up on that intellectual pursuit and allow ourselves to get back to being disturbed by whatever it was that was distracting us from thinking about God.

That sounds, seems, crazy, I know. And it probably is. But that is what atheists, non-believers, do not see. They see God as darkness, as not being there or anywhere, and thus not being period. What has happened is that God’s light is so overwhelming, so bright, that they have been blinded by it, blinded by God’s reality, that they believe their only response is to assert that God does not exist. It is akin to not seeing the forest for all the trees, is it not?

In the final analysis, I think, the only difference between believers and unbelievers is that, although both have been blinded by the light of God, non-believers look into the darkness and see nothing, while we believers look into that same darkness and see everything; we see God. We see God with the light of faith. We can’t explain it. We can’t understand it. And we hardly ever want to go down the road of trying to understand it.

I know all this sounds crazy to those who fail to see the light within the darkness. I also know that it is only faith that allows us to see when we are blinded by the light.