The Center for contemplative practice
A Lay Cistercian Looks at Spiritual Reality
10 THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT GOD
What follows are 10 thoughts I have had about God, some controversial, some traditional, all a part of the Mystery of Faith. The difficult part of limiting 10 ideas about God is daunting because I keep wanting to add more. Actually, God is One. Even that is a Mystery of Faith.
- What we don’t know about God is exponentially more than what we know. What we know is what Christ revealed to us through the writings of Scripture, written by others about Christ (John 20:30) so that each age has the signs Jesus did and thus believe “…that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and in so believing have life through his name.: Being fully human in all things but sin, Christ is the great translator, putting what cannot be put into parables and stories that we humans can understand.
- God is a term we use for The Sacred, The Mystery of Faith, the One. God has a divine nature, not a human one. Christ, because of the love of the Father for the Son in union with the Holy Spirit, became one of us so that we could be adopted sons and daughters.
- God is three distinct persons in one nature, Divine. When we pray to God it is in the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
- God works through nature and through humans. He created us with reason (no other living thing has reason) and the ability to choose good or evil. What we choose is up to us ,using our reason (and our Faith for those living in the spiritual universe). God allows nature to be itself and follow its own rules. God allows us to use nature to determine what is good for us. God sent His Only Begotten Son to be one of us to show us the way, the truth and the life. He entrusted His Apostles to spread these truths to everyone (we term that the Good News) and entrusted the Church to enable its members to give praise and glory to the Father, through, with and in Him. He is physically, mentally and spritually present to us in each age through the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
- Very early Israelites viewed all gods as being powerful, but their God more powerful than others. Abraham was about to sacrifice his son on an altar because everyone around them that they knew were also sacrificing their children to their gods. It was the classic: my god is better than your god.
- Sometimes we pray just to God because God is one, as well as being The One. Koreans call God Hannanim, or holy One (nim means holy; hanna is the numeral, one).
- God is immortal. God lives in Heaven. We don’t know exactly what Heaven is like because we have human nature. Humans don’t do well in heaven. Adopted sons and daughters of the Father with Christ as our friend, is a place in which we can exist, despite our limited knowledge of what to expect.
- Lay Cistercians, following Cistercian spiritual principles have, as a focus, to seek God where we are. God is the Mystery of Faith, the Cloud of the Unknowing, and humans can only approach this Being as humans can, through prayer and having in them the mind of Christ Jesus (Phil 2:5).
- God speaks to us through Christ, His only Son.There is only one way to God, through Christ. Christ gave his Church through Peter and the Apostles His power to teach, to heal, to make Christ present in the Eucharist (the Last Supper), and forgiveness of sins. They transferred this forward through the ages, not from our age to Christ. There is only One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, One Church Universal that is authorized by Christ to give its members grace.
- Whatever you think you know about God is nothing compared to what is real. Jesus cames to give us a hint about God when us used the Father and Son relationship. Knowing that you both don’t know about God, or even more importantly, can’t know about God except through Christ is the beginning of wisdom, only the beginning.
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