Ways Of Coming To Know God
In our previous post – Man’s Desire For God – we took a closer look at who we really are, and by extension, why we are; why we were created. I remember as a child going to Sunday School and to the question, who made you; learning that the answer is, “God made me to know Him, to love His, to serve Him and to be happy with Him in the next. If we take a good at the people around us, we will see that those who are truly happy, those who are truly peace-filled are those who understand and live in this truth.
I just got back from Holy Mass, and the priest who celebrates that Mass would normally make himself available for confession. Just a couple minutes before the start of Mass, there were the shuffling of feet. When I looked up, it was a blind woman making her way to confession. In spite of her challenges, she understands who she is and why she is, and she was making her way to Him, through the priest, to receive mercy. Because of her issues with not being able to see, she could have – heaven forbid – denied God, become bitter, or just indifferent to His existence. But she didn’t. She choose to acknowledge Him and to acknowledge her sinfulness.
Since we are made by God, for God, the next step in faith could be to discover who God is. The Psalmist tells us in Psalm 19 (1 -6):-
The heavens declare the glory of God, the vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork, day discourses of it to day, night to night hands on the knowledge. No utterance at all, no speech, not a sound to be heard, but from the entire earth the design stands out, this message reaches the whole world. High above, he pitched a tent for the sun, who comes forth from his pavilion like a bridegroom, delights like a champion in the course to be run. Rising on the one horizon he runs his circuit to the other, and nothing can escape his heat.
Psalm 19 affirms the the truth that God is real and that His Glory and proof of His existence can be easily seen by looking at creation that surrounds us. The Catechism Of The catholic Church continues:-.
(31) Created in God’s image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of “converging and convincing arguments”, which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. These “ways” of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world, and the human person.
(32) The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world’s order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe.
As St. Paul says of the Gentiles: For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.
And St. Augustine issues this challenge: Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky… question all these realities. All respond: “See, we are beautiful.” Their beauty is a profession [confession]. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One who is not subject to change?
(33) The human person: with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the “seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material”, can have its origin only in God.
(34) The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls God”.
(35) Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man, and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. The proofs of God’s existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.\
CCC 31 – 35
One of our priest here in Trinidad used to tell us that when you come to see and know and acknowledge the Love of God made visible in Christ Jesus, it will charm you into submission. He is quite correct on that. When you come to the point of recognizing that God is real, and that He is Love, and that His Love has no beginning nor end, you will be charmed and your life will begin to change. You will begin to see things differently.
