KNOWING, BEING KNOWN ^_[1]

NOW WE have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.  [1Cor 2:12] 

MORE TO SEEING THAN VISION

1.  Inevitably, every human person is obliged to meditate on the miracle of sight--a phenomenal gift one understandably takes for granted--unless his eyesight should fail.^[2] Vision, to be sure, is not all there is to seeing. The human intellect interprets the data of sight as an aide to comprehending meaning and order with respect to his own existence and the world in which he lives. Intellectual comprehension of things seen and unseen in the order of time and eternity is a remote but essential preparation to espouse virtue, specifically prudence, the correct knowledge concerning the things to be done.

2.  To the extent that one intellectually comprehends meaning and order and acts prudentially, he reveals himself as human and civilized. The fact that a human being can see goodness and act for the sake of goodness is constitutive of personhood, the superlative metaphysical charism by which man is impelled to seek and know the true God in whose image and likeness  [cf. Gen 1:26]  he is created. Thus we may assert that although the gift of human sight is inestimable, the ability to comprehend is greater.

MINUTIAE AND MONUMENT

3.  We take for granted that the ordinary person is competent to substantially apprehend the creative order sustaining the world in which he lives. This prospect, however, is not without formidable implications. The human mind depends on receiving accurate visual information and on forming a sense of perspective--both elements being crucial to the visual order. Hence, a pedestrian accurately computes the position and velocity of a speeding automobile and acts to save his life.

4.  A basketball player’s visual acuity sets up a critical slam-dunk that wins a pennant. The sight-impaired person vigorously concentrates on sound, touch, and smell to perceive the data of visible things in his sphere of activity. Enhancing this information through reason intensified by intuition, he forms an accurate representation of his surroundings. Skillfully navigating his sequential and spatial environment, a blind person can function competently and gracefully as well as any other person. Not unexpectedly, the admirable powers of clinically perfect vision are diminished by excess, trauma and fatigue. A person may be overwhelmed by minutiae as easily as by heavy monumental forms, or rendered blind by his inability to comprehend what he sees. 

HUMAN SCALE

5.  A critical element of the visual order is human scale, a kind of instinctive or intuitive thought process man uses to estimate the world around him. Human scale is an invaluable tool in establishing visual proportion. A human being approximates the relative size of large objects or structures by comparing them to his own stature. He looks at an office building and remarks, That building is five stories tall.^[3] Not surprisingly, the human foot is a measure of length, the hand a measure of height (as in the case of horses).

6.  In pondering the mystery of God, however, one must bridle his impulse to measure or calibrate. When applied to the attributes of the Almighty God’s infinite depth and breadth of divine being, the height and depth of human scale is useless. God is omnipotent, which is a way of saying that he, himself, is ultimate power; supreme over and above anything which man can conceive, God’s power utterly overwhelms the human person’s rudimentary capacity to either measure or imagine. The prophet Isaiah observed, “O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at thy presence.”  [Isa 64:1] 

OMNIPRESENT AND OMNISCIENT

7.  God is omnipresent. Not concealed, constrained in time or apportioned  [cf. Jn 3:34], God is invitatory to all persons in all places. God is capable of being readily and instantly perceived by a single man or woman of good will, or by many or all persons simultaneously in the world who seek him with a sincere heart:  “Am I a God at hand, says the Lord, and not a God afar off? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord”  [Jer 23:23-24]  and “I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me.”  [Pro 8:17]  God is omniscient, he is all knowing, he is all wise. Having infinite awareness, God possesses the plenitude of understanding and insight:  “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”  [Isa 55:8-9] 

HUMAN INSIGHT

8.  Christians value highly the gift of  human insight, the process by which spiritual perceptions are tested by reason and formed into sound ideas. Insight is critical to a Christian’s interpretation and understanding of God’s activity in his individual life. The Old Testament Scriptures poignantly tell the story of man’s inability to relate to God in spite of his every attempt to establish a lasting relationship with Israel. As the prophet Isaiah writes, “Behold, thou wast angry....We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”  [Isa 64:5,6] 

9.  In the ages of ages, God walks with Adam and Eve in the dazzling garden in the cool of the evening breeze.  [cf. Gen 3:8]  In later times, the Almighty  (Heb. El Shaddai)^[4] reveals his glory to Moses and the wandering Israelites.  [cf. Ex 33:17-23]  The Everlasting God  (Heb. El 'Olam)  makes a covenant with the House of David. God Most High  (Heb. El Elyon)  speaks through the prophets. In spite of everything, failure rather than success characterizes man’s spiritual relationship with God. “From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides thee, who works for those who wait for him.”  [Isa 64:4] 

DESIRE OF HUMANITY TO ESCAPE

10.  How can man presume to apply the human scale to the Divine? From the beginning, Christian anthropology recognized the futility of abandoning the supra-temporal vocabulary of prayer and worship in favor of a materialist-categories. Hence, the early Church’s vigorous proclamation of an eschatological Kingdom hastened her definitive departure from Judaism and set her apart from all other religions. St. Paul unhesitatingly identified the world as an arena of contest, a place of struggle entirely appropriate for the perfection of one’s spiritual life.

11.  Though the world provides a wealth of instruction, it is woefully unfit to be a Christian’s primary teacher or to offer an eschatological catechesis of life beyond death. While the world is a suitable place in which to situate hope—humanity’s universal desire to escape the realm of death—material reality cannot be the fulfillment of hope. God the Father has given the world two paracletes (Gk. intercessor, comforter), Christ and the Spirit. “And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever,” says the Lord, “even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.”  [Jn 14:16-17] 

VOCABULARY OF ABSOLUTE TRUTH

12.  We may confidently assert that without God, all men fundamentally are blind to the spiritual order. Divine revelation, aided by the Spirit’s counsel, offers man his only meaningful opportunity for comprehension of the highest order and the path by which his deliverance from death may be assured: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.  [1Cor 13:12]  Hence, the Church resoundingly declared that true faith--“the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  [Heb 11:1]—transcends the material world.

13.  The Church possesses what the human order has consciously relinquished and desperately needs: a vocabulary of absolute truth and its positive assertion such that man’s world--arrested in its development and bereft of its spiritual patrimony--may be resuscitated and restored to health. This necessarily entails man’s fundamental rediscovery of the interrelationship between faith and reason. At the point of their intersection, which Christians know as the cross of Golgotha, is the fulfillment of all human longing, a fulfillment wrought only when human all human hopes and dreams are entrusted to the person whom the world knows as Jesus Christ!^[5]

MANIFEST INTERVENTION OF GOD

14.  In the order of time, according to the Father’s divine plan for the well-being of humankind, he sent his only Son into the world as one like us in all things but sin. The revelation of Jesus Christ is a peerless two-fold gift:  The Christian revelation is a coherent, comprehensive and living spiritual language; its capacity to express the transcendent truth and lead mankind to genuine happiness is precisely found in the realization that this divine vocabulary and the absolute truth emergent from it are indissoluble. In much the same way that the temporal order is contained within infinity and derives its beauty and potency from it, the truth man gleans from his discovery of the wonders of creation is situated within a divine realm beyond the power of man to coerce experience and usurp knowledge.

15.  This realm is spiritual. Though it is possible for man to perceive something of the domain of the spiritual and to derive elemental truths from his observations, it remains impossible for him to grasp its reality let alone to speak of it coherently apart from the direct intervention of God. The human person’s propensity for self-discovery is insufficient to perceive and apprehend the weight of divine truth. Thus, the surpassing intervention of God is manifestly evident to all men and women of goodwill in the incarnation of his only begotten son, our Lord Jesus Christ in whom the sum of all truth is revealed as the divine Logos (Gk. word, truth).

KNEELING BEFORE NOTHING

16.  At the point where self-discovery realizes its profound inadequacies, man must kneel silently before God and the crushing reality of what is impossible for him to know. He must lay down his fear and summon the courage to enter into relationship with God, in answer to the ever-present longing of his soul. He must do so with arms outstretched and hands open. The importance of his submissive posture in the act of adoration should not be understated, for religious movement and gesture is an accurate image of interior disposition and orientation. One has only to recall the pitiable Pharisee whose contempt for God and man was immortalized by our Lord Jesus in his parable: “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself” (emphasis added)  [Lk 18:11] and went home unjustified, that is to say, without the truth or relationship or happiness his soul desired.  [cf. Lk 18:9-14] 

17.  For a human being to presume equality with the transcendent--an elementary way of referring to God--is an act of hubris, the devaluation of genuine relationship based on truth and the good of the other with a corresponding attachment to pride and overweening arrogance. Should man’s hubris swell into outright rejection of God, he will worship himself—and return to a howling wasteland with terrifying implications for his own humanity.  [cf. Deu 32:10]  For man was created by God for adoration, and adore he must. No exaggeration, therefore, is made possible by the honest interpretation of the obvious. Self-adoration demands of man the highest possible price, a cheerless, desolate sacrifice which brings death to the soul. It is the most depraved and humiliating abasement conceivable: the glorification of violence and war, the desecration of human life, and the death of shared hope. Adorning himself with decay, he will have brought himself to kneel before nothing.

FODDER PREFERRED TO EUCHARIST

18.  For men of faith and reason, however, no posture or disposition other than submissive love is appropriate for approaching the deity. I kneel humbly before my Creator whose divine mind is beyond any human power to imagine. I stretch out my arms in need of the goods this mutilated world cannot provide—reconciliation, relationship with God and eternal life. I lift up my open hands to reveal the unspoken thoughts of my heart. I bear no instruments of violence, I am emptied of all human pretension, I am in need of manna (Heb.), a daily portion of the divinity of the infinite world I cannot see and the life-sustaining nourishment without which I cannot possess life or defeat death:  “And the people of Israel ate the manna forty years, till they came to a habitable land; they ate the manna, till they came to the border of the land of Canaan.”  [Exo 16:35]  The people of this generation evidence a desperate need to be liberated from “the principalities…the powers…the world rulers of this present darkness…the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places”.  [Eph 6:12]  The speed of this generation’s precipitous descent is heartbreaking, for it prefers foraging the fodder of cattle  (Lat. farrago)  to partaking of the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the innocent Lamb who was made to lie in Bethlehem’s trough.

LONGING AND NOURISHMENT

19.  Is it possible that this generation has not heard of the Bread of Angels? Or, having heard the Lord’s “words of eternal life”  [Jn 6:68]—“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you”  [Jn 6:53]—they reject the truth as a glaring anachronism of religiosity? Herein lies the Church’s mission to pray for all who are of a divided mind to receive the Spirit of Truth  [cf. Jn 13:16]  when the Spirit himself bears witness to the wisdom and power of the Eucharistic sacrifice of the spotless Lamb.  [cf. 1Pet 1:19, Rev 5:6]  May they eschew the Word of the World and all that which does give life! God does not instill human longing for the food of eternity without providing the nourishment to satisfy it. He will not fail to answer the disciple who bears the paschal likeness of his Son’s redemptive passion and death. “Do not labor for the food which perishes,” declares the Lord, “but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of man will give to you; for on him has God the Father set his seal."  [Jn 6:27] 

WHEN MAN IS RECONCILED

20.  The human person who experiences God’s marvelous love--the supreme expression of which is participation in God’s life through reconciliation and resurrection from the dead—becomes the image and likeness of the divine Logos, having “put on the Lord Jesus Christ”  [Rom 13:14]  in the words of St. Paul and conforming himself to his will.  [cf. 1Cor 2:16]  The apostle Peter eloquently testifies that Jesus Christ who suffered and died on the cross is the sole fulfillment of humankind’s hope. Indeed, Christ who “was carried up into heaven”  [Lk 24:51]  beyond human sight infinitely surpasses all that which mortal man can see or apprehend, indeed the universe of knowledge which eludes his imagination:  “Without having seen him you love him; though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy.”  [1Pet 1:8] 

21.  Not unexpectedly the unstudied sumptuousness of nature—whether delicate or brute--and the self-conscious sensuality of urban cityscapes reveal much about the complex relationship enjoyed when man is reconciled to God: 

WHEN THE poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together; that men may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it. [Isa 41:17-20]  

Of necessity, therefore, man is obliged to orient his activities to the good, that is to say, the personhood and life of the supreme being who conferred on him his own divine image and likeness. Creation, the ubiquitous, visible and beautiful prophet, proclaims the regenerative fruitfulness of God’s invisible, glorious Kingdom of Light. In like manner, the human creature is obliged to receive the divine revelation of God as a sacred pledge of his determination to establish a covenant relationship with the one true God who created him:  “If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will cast you off for ever.”  [1Chron 28:9] 

FRAILTY OF SIGHT AND INSIGHT

22.  We can faithfully interpret and understand our experience of God because we have seen Jesus!  [cf. Lk 2:25-33]  Mankind’s brief experience of the incarnate Logos remains so powerful that it sustains the divine scale on which you and I depend this very day in our relationship with God. Yet not even  the gifts of human sight and insight are impeccable; there are times when we cannot interpret or understand easily. For example, a little child may perceive his body to be larger and more powerful than the objects he views in the distance.

23.  A toddler simply cannot determine accurately the position and velocity of an enormous vehicle, any more than a youth can know what he has not experienced as the consequences of drug use or sexual promiscuity or a man who imagines he has the power to annul the consequences of his adultery. When one loses something of his sense of human scale, he loses something of his general orientation, he loses something of what is revered as the good. In short, to the extent he gives up the good, he loses his humanity. As a consequence, any possibility of a stable and ordered life disintegrates before a whirlwind of changeable, erratic whims. Lawless persons plunder in the name of law. Death is viewed as the necessary consummation—not of despair but of life. Man consumes man.

ELEGANT AERIAL BALLET

24.  An example of this may be seen in the tragic hijacking of Ethiopian Airlines flight 961 which broke apart in the sea off the Comoros Islands on November 23, 1996.]^[6] Apart from the loss of 123 human lives, the video tape of the crash reveals why the horror of this tragedy is magnified. The blank vastness of the east African ocean obscures the colossal dimensions of the B-767, having the effect of making the Boeing jetliner appear to be unreasonably small, as almost a plaything. At the same time--and in apparent contradiction--the jetliner’s enormous bulk makes it appear to be flying much slower than in reality . These visual anomalies permeate the video with a surreal quality. In its final pirouette, the aircraft seems to be a child’s toy in a kind of elegant, graceful, aerial ballet. How can anyone prepare for what was about to happen? How can anyone understand what he sees? The frightening explosion of the jetliner shatters all incongruities and human expectations. The observer's false impressions of size and speed explode.^[7]

TRAGEDY CONVEYS WARNING

25.  The eruption of wing and water marking the airliner’s final agony arouses the man of goodwill to confront his frail human powers. It demands that he critique his alarming disorientation in the presence of evil and the monumental fact of his own mortality. Tragedy conveys warning on many levels. Perhaps it may serve to diminish one’s compulsion to rationalize evil and to explain away the reality of sin and its accrued indifference and hostility in our world. “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, lest the darkness overtake you; he who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes.”  [Jn 12:35]  Let us develop the spiritual gifts of sight and insight while there is still time.

26.  Against the backdrop of a measureless universe whose constellations process in an orderly fashion through time and space, human beings from one generation to the next have been tempted consistently to make God unreasonably small. The wood and stone deities of the past have been replaced by the more sinister idolatry of the autonomous self, a popular but indigestible confection of pride brushed over by a thin glaze of God is Love. Man knows that human scale is useless in comprehending the height and depth of space, yet in the face of infinity, he will sacrifice his own illimitable soul to inhuman self-deification. The fact that one may perceive spiritual consolation to be inaccessible, however, must not provoke him to spiritual militancy. God has not abandoned man. God has not determined the human condition to be irrelevant. God exists! To find meaning in God is man’s fulfillment. Union with God is man’s destiny.

CAN FLESH KNOW SPIRIT?

27. When observing the enormous bulk that characterizes our universe, we acknowledge the slow development of planets and stars in terms of trillions of years. Characteristic of human weakness, mortal man presumes that God himself is but the procession of time and cannot be moved by such things as love, personhood and relationship. Perceiving that the whole of his life will escape notice or consequence in the astronomic scheme of things, he drowns in promiscuity and consumption or withers in despair conscious of his existential loneliness and estrangement. Can the God of the Spirit know the man of flesh? To this question, the Church unhesitatingly answers Yes, because the Lord of Eternity condescended to accept human form as his very own; incarnate in the flesh as a laborer, he took upon his shoulders the totality of human experience. Yet he was innocent and did not yield to sin.

28.  And knowing the suffering of man and seeing how man was slaughtered like cattle butchered for market, this Jesus-Servant entered the terror of death to destroy the engine of its power, “the prince of the power of the air”.  [Eph 2:2]  He did this once for all time on the cross of Zion in Judea.  [cf. Phi 2:6-11]  Can the man of flesh know the God of the Spirit? Man who is known by God can know God:  “But if one loves God, one is known by him.”  [1Cor 8:3]  The psalmist David cries out, “What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him? Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor.”  [Psa 8:4-5]  God is not generous for the sake of our leisure, however. The Master of heaven and earth will appear without warning:  "Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.”  [Jn 5:25]  The hour of the Lord’s return is near. Human hearts sense urgency. Time grows short. The glory of the Lord will not long delay.

MODEL OF HUMAN POSSIBILITY

29.  I conclude by reiterating that the human person’s ability to interpret and understand what he sees or experiences is far more complex than the organ of sight itself. Appropriately, one uses the word insight to refer to inner vision and the discernment of ultimate truth and reality. The truth is that Jesus Christ came into our world to lead us to the Father! As Christians, what should our perspective be? Answers Jesus, “He who has seen me has seen the Father….What you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” [Jn 14:9, 13]  Our Saviour Jesus Christ “emptied himself  (Gk. kenosis), taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men”.  [Phi 2:7]  This Jesus—“He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary”^[8]--became a model of human possibility rooted in genuine hope so that we might imitate his example by humbling ourselves and obeying God rather than regarding equality with God a thing to be grasped.  [cf. Phi 2:6-11]  To behold the Kingdom of God, one truly must be born anew.  [cf. Jn 3:3]  What Jesus spoke to Thomas the doubter, you must take to heart: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”  [Jn 20:29] 

^[1]  Cycle B   /First Sunday of Advent   /Isa 63:16-17,19, 64:2-7   /1Cor 1:3-9   /Mk 13:33-37.  

^[2]  Like a camera or camcorder, the eye has a light diaphragm called an iris and a lens for variable focusing. The retina lining the inner eye is the living medium on which external images are projected. From there coded nerve impulses travel the optic nerve to the brain.  

^[3]  A high-rise office building with no horizontal lines may conceal its real height or bulk or relation to other structures. The Standard Oil Building (1974) in Chicago is an eighty story tower faced with light gray marble lacking in human scale, considered a serious flaw among architects. 

^[4]  Cf  Martin Rose, "Names of God in the Old Testament", ANCHOR BIBLE DICTIONARY, eds. David Noel Freedman, et al., vol. 4 (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 1001-1011.    

^[5]  John Paul II,  Fides et Ratio,  no. 33  (1998). “From all that I have said to this point it emerges that men and women are on a journey of discovery which is humanly unstoppable—a search for the truth and a search for a person to whom they might entrust themselves. Christian faith comes to meet them, offering the concrete possibility of reaching the goal which they seek. Moving beyond the stage of simple believing, Christian faith immerses human beings in the order of grace, which enables them to share in the mystery of Christ, which in turn offers them a true and coherent knowledge of the Triune God. In Jesus Christ, who is the Truth, faith recognizes the ultimate appeal to humanity, an appeal made in order that what we experience as desire and nostalgia may come to its fulfillment.” 

^[6]  Cf  Christopher Kilroy, ed., "Special Report: Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961", online,  http://www.airdisaster.com/ , Accident Database:  1997-2004.  

^[7] Fervent prayer is needed on behalf of sanguinary persons who view tragic film footage such as the wanton destruction of Flight 961 as a form of so-called reality entertainment.

^[8] SACRAMENTARY, “Profession of Faith”, Nicene Creed (1985).