On understanding
our relationship with God

Speaking of Religion
The Rev. Dr. Tim Griffin

"What we are looking for is what is looking." (Francis of Assisi)

"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." (Meister Eckhart)

I recently encountered the above quotation from St. Francis on an e-mail list-serve to which I belong. Upon reading it, I was immediately reminded of the quotation from Meister Eckhart. I want to reflect on these two statements because they instruct us, in a wonderfully pithy way, about our relationship to God and about how we are to understand that relationship and come to "know" God more fully.
For both St. Francis and Meister Eckhart, we come to know God and understand our relationship with God by looking within. More particularly, we come to "know" God and understand our relationship with God by reflecting on our yearning and seeking after God. God is in the midst of that yearning and seeking. When we look within and contemplate our yearning and seeking, we discover God is there. It is God who has been yearning for and seeking us.
Of course even when we are aware of this, God remains wrapped in mystery. I am somehow aware, when I focus upon it, that my yearning and seeking does not belong to me — that although it arises from within it is not quite "mine." That is to say, it is mine in the sense that I experience the longing, yearning and seeking, and it is not mine in the sense that it draws me out of myself to that which is at once more than I am (transcendent) and closer to me than I am to myself (intimate).
How am I to make sense of that? Let’s face it: it does not seem to be the sort of thing about which one makes sense.
For many of us, that’s the problem. We are taught to make sense of things, and it seems that we are either hardwired or conditioned to make sense of things in terms of subjects and objects. Typically this means something like "I am the subject and that outside of me is the object." On this reckoning the object is separate from me and me from it.
There are, then, two things — the knower and the known. Even in the case of self-knowledge, we tend to operate in this way so that when I know something about myself, I (the subject) know something about myself (the object). But when it comes to knowledge of God, the object and subject are so intertwined that they are inseparable.
For this reason, mystics like St. Francis and Meister Eckhart — not to mention Rumi, Thomas Merton, Rabbi David Cooper, etc. — find this way of knowing inadequate to capture one’s experience of God because God is not an object at all. Consequently God cannot be known in the way we know things in the world.
Eckhart puts the point in this way: "[t]he knower and the known are one. Some people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge."
"God and I, we are one in knowledge."
Significantly, that statement holds whether it is uttered by Muslim, Jew or Christian. God is uniquely present with and to each of us.
Again Eckhart expresses the point with wonderful clarity: "Every creature is a word of God."
That being the case, all of the hatred, bigotry and prejudice generated by today’s jingoistic "god-talk" may be seen for the childishness that it is. After all this "god-talk" is simply our effort to fix God and our relationship with God within a conceptual apparatus.
But when we begin to seriously question ourselves, we soon discover the commonality of our experience and the limitations of our ability to express our experiences conceptually. That is to say, we quickly find ourselves at the extreme edges of language and thought.
If we accept these limitations, we can delight in them and learn to love God and one another more ardently precisely because we see that our limitations are shared with others. On the other hand, if we react to our limitations in an insecure way, we become ever more insistent that we have fully comprehended God in our concepts, and we feel threatened by anyone whose concepts differ from our own. ••
Father Tim Griffin is priest-in-charge at the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, at 1946 Welsh Road in Bustleton.