Thomas
Keating was a Trappist monk, a Cistercian of the Strict Observance. He died two years ago aged 94. I met him when he was the speaker at the John
Main Seminar in San Francisco in 1998.
So much for the name-dropping… Somewhere
in Keating’s many writings I came across his comments on a passage in the First
Letter to Timothy, and in particular on this sentence: God… alone possesses immortality and
dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.[1]
The
church would do better to be more reticent about God. Much that we hear, whether it is from
statements of belief or from the loopier wings of fundamentalism, simply makes sensitive
followers of Christ cringe. As we keep
saying, we need to identify idolatry for what it is… making God, one way or
another, inevitably some replica of ourselves.
Our idea of God, wrote Thomas Merton, tells us more about
ourselves than about God. That is
why the Hebrews in ancient times recorded what we know as the Second
Commandment, which forbids any image of God because, however holy and exalted,
it cannot be other than a distortion.
Timothy
is reminded that God dwells in inaccessible light. Faith proceeds by unknowing… by sight
unseen. Keating writes: Anything that we perceive of God can only
be a radiance of (God’s) presence and not God as (God is).[2] It is, he says, something like the effect of
a prism… as though the divine light is separated into the varied colours of a
spectrum, and what we may “see”, one way or another, is one radiance, one
aspect, of the Ultimate Mystery. In the
cute imagery of the ancient writings, Moses on Mount Sinai saw only the “back
parts” of the divine presence.[3]
St
Paul writes that Jesus is the image of the invisible God.[4] “Image” in the Greek is icon (εἰκων). Icons are not central in western Christian
spirituality and worship, but they are certainly central and crucial are in
eastern Orthodox Christianity. An icon
is not intended as an oil painting or any other kind of graphic art. The point about any icon is to see through
it, as it were, glimpses, radiances, of the divine light and truth.[5]
The Apostle John makes
it clear: No one has ever seen God;
if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.[6] Love, with its attendant truth and
understanding, freedom, unity and peace, is the infallibly recognisable radiance
of God. In our kind of world it may indeed
be fleeting and fragile. But we “see”
with the eye of the heart. We see others
also opening to truth and grace, in love, and becoming able like true pilgrims
to share the light they have found along the road.
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