[Pearls Episode 142: Bringing Sunday into the workweek.]
We pray you had a wonderful Sunday and your workweek is off to a great start. Karen was on retreat this weekend, so on this post you’re stuck with just Steve.
We’ve been looking at “the prayer of the lowly that pierces the clouds.” In the postscript we see how this meets with practical reality. But first, let’s look at supernatural reality…
St. Paul tells us that in the end only these three remain – faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love. The fundamental theology behind this is that ultimately faith will give way to sight (we will “see” God) and hope will give way to possession – and in seeing and possessing God = we will love Him.
But … there’s more to it – starting with our two spiritual powers of intellect and will.
Let’s start with intellect. We certainly can’t know God perfectly. If fact, we can’t know a stump perfectly. When did the stump first start to grow from an acorn? How tall did the tree grow? How long did it live? What birds and animals made it their home? What caused the tree to die?
If a stump is beyond us, when it comes to God, it turns out we can’t know Him at all. A familiar analogy is the sun. You can’t look at the sun without being blinded. Nobody living has direct experiential knowledge of what the sun looks like. The best we can do is briefly squint at it; or view at images of it. But gaze at it directly? No way.
God is greater than 100 billion times 100 billion suns. That is why “no man can see Me and live.”
Yes – we start on the path of growing in holiness by knowing God through the Son. Christ gives us a human image of God. But over time that human knowledge gives way to the supernatural reality, and we recognize for ourselves, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” (Is 55:9)
That is what St. Thomas Aquinas experienced when God blessed him with the briefest sliver of a glimpse of God’s true greatness. And after that, Aquinas – towering intellect that he was – turned aside from his work because he realize it was “so much straw” compared to the incomprehensible greatness of God.
But what of our will – which is the seat of our ability to love?
While we can’t know God perfectly, we can love God perfectly. Which is to say, we can sacrifice ourselves perfectly. That is the life of the Trinity – three divine persons constantly pouring themselves out. Our human soul is infinitesimal compared to God, but we can still pour it out completely – which is to love perfectly. That is the example of the Saints.
The Cloud of Unknowing puts it this way – “by sanctifying grace our soul is made fully sufficient to grasp Him in His entirety by love – God, who is beyond the reach of all created intellectual faculties, such as those angels and human souls (I mean beyond the reach of their knowledge and not of their love).”
The anonymous author goes so far as to say we can grasp God “in His entirety” through our capacity to love. Why? Because God is pure love – pure self-giving – that is all that He is. If we love perfectly (which will be the case when we’re perfected in heaven) – we will love as God loves, and in that sense, we will grasp Him in His entirety.
We don’t think our way to God. In fact, at some point our knowledge gets in the way. And that’s when we must “unknow” so that we can lover our way to Him.
Blessings on your journey with Christ –
Steve
Steve and Karen Smith
Interior Life
PS: Where the rubber of unknowing meets the road of God’s love.
In Sunday’s Gospel reading we were presented with the tax collector who beat his breast and cried out, “have mercy on me, a sinner.” Jesus confirms that to be a cloud-piercing prayer.
Cloud-piercing prayer is simple and humble. In the words of scripture – it is childlike.
And that is the point of the Cloud of Unknowing – we are all children compared to the immensity of God. And, in the right way, we should relate to God as an infant to its parents. When an infant needs something, it just cries out – that cry is a prayer. And the infant simply trusts in the goodness of the parents – that they will respond.
The Cloud of Unknowing likens this to simple cries that pierce our own mind and heart. In the face of an emergency people just shout “Fire!” or “Help!” or “Run!” Those rudimentary cries from the heart pierce our mind, they get our attention and galvanize our will to respond. So too, when we cry out to God simply and humbly what is on our heart, as an infant crying out to its parent, we place ourself squarely in the midst of Sunday’s first reading:
“The prayer of the lowly pierces the clouds; it does not rest till it reaches its goal, nor will it withdraw till the Most High responds, judges justly and affirms the right, and the Lord will not delay.”