Pastor's Points: Finding and Knowing God

Pastor's Points: Finding and Knowing God

One of the most well-known theologians of our common era was Karl Rahner. Rahner was born in Freiburg, Germany in 1904 and died in 1984. As Kevin O’Brien, S.J. wrote in the May 3, 2004 edition of America Magazine, the crux of Rahner’s theology is this : “that each of us is made to be in intimate relationship with our creator, who is at once uniquely personal and ultimately mysterious to us. To find God, we need to look no further than to our deepest, truest longings and the ordinary stuff of daily living.”
 
In our everyday lives, we search for God. We want to feel that God knows us. We want to have an intimate union with the Divine. Sometimes, though, we may be looking a little too hard and we fail to see how God is intervening in the ordinary stuff of our lives. God is intimately revealing His divine self to us day in and day out. And think about that word “intimacy.” In my homily for Holy Thursday, I spoke about how Jesus, through the washing of the disciple’s feet, was inviting them into intimacy. That is a word that we reserve to speak about the people who are closest to us. But it can also be an uncomfortable word because it implies a relationship of total trust, true and faithful love and total comfortableness. Just think about that for a second.  We are called to be “comfortable” with our God. This is a God that loves us so much, so intimately that we should feel nothing but comfortable with him. If our everyday living is a revelation of the presence of the Most High God, then indeed we should be able to be intimate with that God who is all around us.
 
Fr. Rahner gives a wonderful description of the human person as “ the event of a free, unmerited and forgiving, and absolute self-communication of God.  Each person is an “event”: not some static thing but a dynamic center of consciousness that is always striving for something more, for something or someone beyond ourselves.  We are not satisfied with being finite and alone. We yearn for what is absolute and infinite. In other words, we long for God.” Yes, God reveals himself around us each day, but not totally.  We will never be able to figure out who God is. God is ultimately a mystery into which we must immerse ourselves. The whole of our life is a longing for the fullness of the life of God.   
 
One of the first things I learned in the seminary was the definition of the word “theology.”  Theology is faith seeking understanding. We all have faith in our God. Yet the study and pursuit of theology is a process to understand our faith, to explain our faith, to enter more deeply into our faith. Rahner’s view of theology was that it is a process with more questions than answers, not a closed system. God is the object of theology. God is also ultimate mystery, and no words or concepts about God will ever be adequate to describe who God is. And so no answer about God will ever be complete; we live our Christian lives in pursuit of God who—at the same time—is pursuing us. We long to understand who God is, while at the same time we are mindful that we will never really know all the answers.  It is a journey that will only be complete when we stand face to face with God one day in paradise. Until then, we share in intimacy with God as much as we can in recognizing the signs of the Holy One in our midst each day.