Jesus Cannot Be Known Second-Hand

the first part of a dialog with Bradley Jersak on mystical experience and intimacy with God

Caspar David Friedrich The Monk by the Sea 1810

B: As you know, I’ve been deeply involved in conversations about “deconstruction.” And I’m happy to say that I’m seeing what I take to be a renewed thirst for something real, transcendent, mysterious. Some are still loath to call it God, but they know they are sensing a need to experience their union with the Good, the True, the Beautiful. So, I’m groping for the best, or at least less inadequate, words to describe this experience of union, what Fleming Rutledge calls our “living connection to God.” And I’m also hoping to discover better ways of orienting ourselves to it. I guess it comes down to a pair of questions for you: Can we really feel our connection to God? And if so, how do we facilitate an awareness of that connection?

C: Good questions. First, I agree that we need experiences of transcendence, and that we live in union with God. But I want to hasten to add that God is not simply identical either with the transcendent or with our experience of union. St Maximus is right, I believe: Jesus is “God by nature, and Deity beyond all knowledge as God beyond God.”

B: Not exactly sure what Maximus means there (as is often the case), but what really resonates to me is when (in QThal 60.5) he distinguishes “relative knowledge based only on reasoning and concepts” from “the knowledge that is true…, which is gained only by actual experience…and provides, by grace through participation, a whole perception of the One who is known.” He uses phrases that get at what I think is necessary: “participative knowledge acquired through active engagement” and “active, experiential knowledge, which by participation furnishes the direct perception of what is known.”

C: Right. Without downplaying the very real and sometimes drastic differences between Christian spiritual traditions, I think we can say that a majority of Christians have held we’re all meant to share in “experiential knowledge” through “participation” in Christ. Maximus affirms that, and takes seriously what that must mean for us. He realizes that because our relationship to God happens within the Father’s knowing of the Word as the “all in all,” there can never be a point at which we’ve arrived at comprehension—not even in the ages to come. God is always here, only ever caring for us. We’re never separated from him, from Jesus, thanks to the Spirit. Indeed, As St Paul puts it, Christ is our life, and our lives are bound up together, hidden away inside his. Hence, we are always connected—not only with God but also with each other. Far more intimately than we would dare imagine. Precisely for that reason, however, we are not always aware of the intimacy—and in some senses cannot be.

B: I agree with most of this. I’m not sure about the last assertion—why in some senses we cannot be aware of our intimacy. There’s more to be said, for sure. Carry on.

C: As you know, many of the wisest folks in our tradition (and other traditions, as well) have urged us to be especially careful when we’re talking about or praying for “experience.” Why? They knew that while it’s true that we can’t live without experiences of the transcendent, it’s also true that those experiences can and often do become occasions of temptation. But my point is a different one: even at their truest and best, “experiences” are signs, never, in themselves, the full reality; they serve to awaken desire in us for the infinite, enlarging out capacity for a goodness utterly beyond our ken, things too wonderful for us to know.

B: With you on that. There’s no question that “experiences” can become addictions and idols. We’ve both seen that. As you’ve said, they can devolve into an obsession for an experience of our experience. And yet I don’t see the opposite ditch as desirable—an abstracted God who is remote and unknowable.      

C: Absolutely. Encounters with the holy, the sublime, the glorious, the beautiful—these are good. Not to be despised. Not to be taken lightly. But we are meant for more than such experiences and the transcendental feelings and thoughts they generate. We’re meant for more even than mystical flashes of intimacy with God. We are meant for God. Full stop. And the knowing of God draws us toward an unknowing that leads into a knowing much, much too deep and wide for our thoughts or feelings to take in. In Dionysius’ formulation, if I am beholding God and understand what I see, it is not God I have seen but something of God’s. As he puts in the third letter to Gaius, “Jesus is hidden even after this revelation, or, if I may speak in a more divine fashion, is hidden even amid the revelation. For this mystery of the incarnation remains hidden and can be drawn out by no word or mind. What is to be said of it remains unsayable; what is to be understood of it remains unknowable.” Remember the story of Jacob at Bethel? He awoke, boasting, “Surely God is in this place, and I knew it not.” But here’s the deeper, dizzying wonder: in a very real sense, Jacob knew even less about God right after his experience than he had known before it!

B: That’s part of why this discussion is so important to me. Words like “encounter” and “experience” can describe something flashy and fleeting. I do like Rutledge’s “living connection” because it speaks to something ongoing, relational, and specific to our union with God in Christ. All that said, what matters most to me right in this moment is emphasizing the reality of our union with Christ, our felt communion with him. Somehow, the spring of living water that gushes up to eternal life needs to become real to me, does it not? That’s the question I want to ask. What does it mean for God to be real to me?

C: There’s much that’s real for me that’s not yet real to me, obviously. In fact, if the Gospel is true, then almost everything that’s real for me isn’t yet real to me because my experience of goodness can never, at least in this life, come close to catching up to the unbounded good that’s there working on me, sustaining me, freeing me. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to catch up to that goodness. Or that we can’t lay hold of some of the good as it’s happening! We can and we must. That’s part of what it means to be human. You might say we’re the animal God has made specifically for bringing our desire for and delight in God’s goodness to speech.

B: But wouldn’t you say that conscious awareness of our living connection with God is important? Basic, even, to what it means to live by faith?

C: Absolutely. Faith is already an awareness, one that we’re compelled to share—to speak, to sing. I’m only saying that our failures to find words for what we’re sensing matter every bit as much as our apparent successes because God is endlessly, overwhelmingly knowable—always more than we can ask or think!

B: If it is so, and it is, that God is Love, then God must be knowable in a way that is good for us, that is loving. And if that is so, and it is, then we have to ask how we are to come to “gnow” this “gnowable” God? I guess I’m getting down to the most basic pastor-evangelist question: How do I know God and share life with God? So many who claim their deconstruction led them to abandon Jesus report that they never knew him. He was, I suppose, no more than an idea, an indoctrination. I find myself wanting to ask why, for me, he was somehow “real,” but not for them.

C: God cannot be known second-hand.

B: Right! My hope is that our priesthood is to facilitate at least the possibility or create the space for first-hand access...   

C: Let me put your question back to you. Why do you think God is real to you in a way God is not for others?

B: One aspect is surely “wiring,” no? And the parable of the Sower must also be relevant. Hard hearts, busy hearts, cluttered hearts, soft hearts. Perhaps God is always speaking, but some of us are simply not “tuning in,” because our lives are too chaotic. As beloved children, we have a caring Father. But sometimes we lose sight of that care, exactly as the prodigal sons did.

C: Yes. We do “lose sight.” It’s hard not to. For what it’s worth, however, I don’t think “wiring” is the issue; it surely doesn’t factor for God. The Spirit is not at the mercy of our peculiarities! And I also want to say that God’s “silence,” in and of itself, is not the consequence of our failure to “tune in,” but a grace required by our nature. God’s silence is a pregnant silence, not a vacuum but a word that cannot be heard. It is holding us, that is why we cannot hold it. I believe we can and should cultivate awareness of God’s nearness and a taste for the sweetness of His presence. I also want to caution against making experiences of God the measure of our faithfulness to God or God’s faithfulness to us.

B: I hear you, but I do not want to downplay or marginalize the need for “tasting the sweetness of God’s presence,” as you put it. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” covers a lot. Grace precedes everything… first: “the Lord is good.” Then the invitation (command?) to experience (“taste”), which leads to awareness of what has been experienced (“see”). Finally come testimony and confession: “Yes, the Lord is good!” 

C: That’s a very helpful reading. I might add a few minor details: (a) our “taste” first needs training, (b) our palate changes as we mature, and (c) certain sicknesses can deaden our tastebuds. So, “gnowing” God, as you put it, is only possible as we “gnaw” God! For Origen, that means chewing on the meanings of the Scriptures. For Buber, it means trusting to the ways of dialog. I read this in his Between Man and Man just today: “A person can try with all his or her strength to resist the presence of ‘God,’ and yet one tastes God in the strict sacrament of dialogue.” We cannot not “taste God.” The question is do we “gnaw” God or not.

B: Ha! Yes! Admittedly, sometimes our first taste is the most dramatic. I don’t know if that’s because God sometimes first uses spectacle to get our attention (as with Moses and Paul) or whether we simply grow (by gnawing—I love that) in our capacity to stand in God’s presence. But then again, Christ’s most intimate friend (John the Beloved) went from intimacy to awe. So I guess God won’t be boxed into a pattern we can control.

C: Precisely. God cannot be fenced. And yet, this seems crucial (pun intended) to me: there’s a way of craving experiences that actually leaves us starving, because experiences of God do not and cannot satisfy our deepest needs. Only God can do that. There’s a temptation, is there not, to try to turn stones to bread rather than accepting seasons of fasting? That said, given that God is the God he is, even the lack of experience turns out to be way of God becoming real to us. I agree that we need to realize more and more that God is with us. And I think experiences big and small, quiet and loud, dark and bright can help us come to that awareness. But only as they are framed by seasons of fasting, times of “want.” No?

B: YES. Certain experiences do sometimes tempt us to idolize our feelings and to totalize our perceptions. “The dark night” can serve as a cure for all that nonsense. Conversely, there is a faux maturity, wearied by striving to know God, that has hardened into cynicism. It’s a “dead stability” that only mimics apatheia. It may pride itself in avoiding flighty or frenetic experientialism, but it cannot rightly be called fellowship with God. In fact, I’d say it’s a form of despair.

C: Agreed. Although it’s important to note that the “darkness” St John of the Cross describes is an effect of the inflow of grace—not the interruption of it! Our humanity is being healed by that inflowing, not negated or effaced. As Jenson put it, “God is hidden by and only by the thoroughness of his self-revelation.” All I mean to do is underscore the reality of that hiddenness! Would you say there’s ever a time God, in order to bring us to Godself, needs to save us from experience?

B: Saved from attachment to a presumed form of experience, definitely. But saved from fellowship with the Father? Saved from a life immersed in God’s ever-flowing mercy? No. Do I need saving from my realization that his mercy endures forever? I don’t think so. Do I need saving from my attachment to specific forms in which that realization has come to me, and the expectations of certain outcomes generated by that attachment? Absolutely. And to confirm your point, note that John’s “dark night” or Ignatius of Loyola’s “desolation,” and virtually every apophatic theologian from Basil the Great to Simeon the New Theologian to Meister Eckhart were all seasoned mystics describing what you beautifully named as the effects of “inflows of grace.” They weren’t cold-hearted rationalists justifying their lack of fellowship with God or setting that grace aside as inaccessible.    

C: Yes. Exactly.  

B: While I affirm the need for authentic apatheia and self-forgetfulness, I believe the Gospel promises us fellowship with the God of the Gospel. The Father and the Son have made their home in us through the Spirit who dwells in the inner chambers of our heart. Love compels us to become more and more present to that reality. We’re meant to know it—to know him!—as a reality. So it seems wrong to me to question the reality of our experiences of the risen Christ.

C: Again, I agree. And to be abundantly clear: I am not questioning that reality at all! Just the opposite, in fact. I’m wanting to emphasize the super-abundance, the how-much-more-ness of God’s care for us. I also want to be sensitive to the complexity of human experience, and to the ways in which evil preys on our unloving self-preoccupation. I also want to insist that there are times in which it’s best for us not to “experience” God. There is, of course, the “dark night.” Times in which God “absents” so our hearts can be cured, cleared. But we also need rest.

B: Could we say that there’s a “companionable silence” rather than an actual absence of the One who promised to abide in us forever and never leave us? What fluctuates is not Christ’s faithfulness, but my perception of his “withness,” his mode of self-revelation to me, which is fitted to the wisdom of my needs.

C: Yes. That’s very helpfully put, I think.

B: At the risk of using words like “relationship” or “intimacy” with those who’ve seen them despoiled, God’s choice metaphor for this is spousal covenant, and such relationships include a great variety of experiences. Spouses learns to commune in an almost endless variety of ways. Dinner. Movies. Lovemaking. Chores. Puzzles. Conversations (some heated!). And I believe it’s fair to ask Jesus how I might best “show up” today, rather than deluding myself by telling him how I need him to show up for me. I trust that the One who said, “Call and I will answer,” would offer at least a sense to those who pay attention and behold the One standing and knocking at our door.

C: If, as Paul says, we’re one body with Christ, and husbands and wives are told not to “defraud” one another, then we must not defraud Christ (we know he will not defraud us). And, as you’ve said, we can commune, connect, embrace without ceasing. But what we cannot do, I believe, is remain in a constant state of feeling the connection. We can’t hear the music of God’s delight in us without rest notes. But that can be, as you said, a companionable silence. Nothing separates us from God. And God never forsakes us. Still, God does know when we need “distance.” And that too is a form of intimacy. Rest can be shared. “Sleeping together” has a double meaning for a reason.

B: Wow. Yes. Amen.

C: Here’s what I’m saying, or trying to. The deepening of intimacy requires breaks in the experience of pleasures. Eckhart says that if I were caught up into the third heaven with St Paul, and a sick man asked for soup, I should descend to him—because that is where Christ truly is. Sometimes, we can’t be Mary except as Martha. Etty Hillesum, in one of her last notes to a friend, said this: “Someone has to act as if God were real. Someone has to make God credible by the way they meet life and death.” She’s dead right (an invaluable turn of phrase!), I believe. It’s vital for God to be real to us. No doubt. But the only evidence that God is indeed real to us is that we realize God for others—especially those most in need and closest at hand.