Doug Hammershull,
That UN former UN Secretary General puts it so beautifully.
God does not die he says the day we deny his existence but we die on the day that our lives cease to be illumined by the radiance of a wonder which we can never describe which is quite beyond us.
We die the day our lives cease to be illumined by that radiance,
That wonder.
And we don't have to quarrel about a word because God is only a word is it not.
God is only a concept.
One never quarrels about reality.
We only quarrel about opinions,
About concepts,
About judgments.
Don't seek for truth only drop your concepts,
Drop your opinions,
Drop your prejudices,
Drop your judgments and you will see.
We cannot tell you God's way of being but rather the way he is not.
The loftiest degree of our knowledge of God is to know God as the unknown.
Tam kwami gnottum.
This is what is ultimate in the human knowledge of God.
To know that we do not know God.
In India we have a Sanskrit saying for this kind of thing it is neti neti not that not that sometimes referred to as the via negativa negative way.
You know I read a marvelous work by the famous C.
S.
Lewis.
He has a little booklet,
A Grief Observed was his diary when his wife died.
He married an American woman said to his friends God gave me in my 60s what he denied me in my 20s I'm wildly in love.
Fell in love with this woman,
Married her and he had hardly married her when she died a painful death of cancer.
Then C.
S.
Lewis says the whole of my faith crumpled like a house of cards.
He asks himself is God a loving father or is he the great vivisector?
Pretty good evidence for both things.
And you can look at things in a somewhat slanted way and push aside evidence of the contrary.
Remember when my own mother got cancer my sister said to me Tony why did God allow this to happen to mother?
I said my dear last year a million people died in China of starvation,
Of a drought calculated at almost a million.
You never raised the question.
And so sometimes the nicest thing that could happen to us for us to be awakened to reality is for calamity to strike.
Then we begin to rethink.
Then you might lose your beliefs and come to faith,
Your childish beliefs and come to faith as C.
S.
Lewis did.
Do read that book it's marvelously written.
He said you know I never had any doubt before about people surviving death but when my wife died my I was no longer certain.
Why?
Because it was so important to me that she be living and you know he's the master of comparisons and analogies.
He says it's like a rope someone says to you would this carrier would this bear the weight of about a hundred and twenty pounds and you say yeah yeah well we're going to let down your best friend on this rope.
He said wait a minute let me test that again.
Now you're not so sure.
And somewhere in that diary he says a marvelous thing.
I was so happy and consoled this was years ago to find him say we know nothing about God.
We cannot know anything about God.
Even our very questions about God are absurd.
Marvelous.
Of course your questions are absurd.
Why?
It's like the person born blind the man born blind who says to you that color green is it hot or is it cold?
Naiti,
Naiti,
Not that,
Not that.
Is it long or is it short?
Not that.
Is it sweet or is it sour?
Not that.
Is it round or is it oval or is it square?
Not that,
Not that.
See he's coming from the other senses from his limited experience.
He has no words,
No concepts for this world of which he has no idea,
No intuition,
No experience,
A world of colors.
One can only speak in analogies.
Not that.
No matter what he asks it isn't that.
Your wording is wrong.
Your question is absurd.
So C.
S.
Lewis says something like this.
I'm not quite sure I've got the exact word but it's something like this.
It's like asking how many minutes are there in the color yellow?
And everybody's taking it very seriously and discussing it and fighting about it.
You know what the answer to that question is?
How many minutes are there in the color yellow?
25 carats.
And the other guy says no 17 potatoes and then they're fighting.
Not that,
Not that.
The ultimate,
This is what is ultimate in the human knowledge of God to know that we do not know.
Our great tragedy my dears is that we know too much.
We think we know.
That is our tragedy.
So we never discover.
In fact,
Thomas Aquinas is not only a theologian,
He's a great philosopher and he says repeatedly in many places,
All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.
