(The Nationalist, 12 March 2004)
Does thinking about God put you to sleep? If it does, you’re in good company. Abraham was one of the great figures of the Old Testament, and the Bible describes an experience he had of God. The description ends by saying that Abraham ‘fell into a deep sleep’ (Genesis 15.12.)
Later on, in the Gospels, Peter, James and John had an overpowering experience of God while with Jesus on a mountain top. The Gospel says, ‘they were heavy with sleep’. (Luke 9.32)
Still later on, when Jesus was suffering before his passion in the garden of Gethsemane, in the company of the same Peter, James and John, and needed their support, he found them sleeping (Matthew 26.40.) He woke them up, but they fell asleep again, ‘for their eyes were heavy’ (Matthew 26.43.)
Each of those people had had an overpowering experience of God. They had been in God’s presence in some way, and it was too much for them. They saw something of the glory of God and were overcome by it. They had to switch off because they could not grasp the mystery. God is a mystery and can never be otherwise.
The great saints of the Church were modest in what they said about God. For example, Thomas Aquinas wrote, ‘In the last resort all we know of God is to know that we do not know, since we know that what God is, surpasses all that we can understand of him’. And, ‘God is self-evident, but what it is to be God is not self-evident to us’. And also, ‘More true than our speech about God is our thinking of him, and more true than our thinking is his being’.
Another Christian writer, Saint Augustine, wrote, ‘Beware of affirming the unknown as known’, and, ‘If anyone thinks he has understood God, then whatever it was he understood, or thought he understood, it was not God.’
Only God understands God. We may know that God is; we cannot know what God is. Let God be God – and sleep well on it.
Saint John of the Cross wrote, ‘To reach union with the wisdom of God a person must advance by unknowing rather than by knowing’. (The Ascent of Mount Carmel, 1.4.6)