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Reflection for July 10, 2005

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This essay is offered as a hearing aid.

Lately my hearing has gotten worse. For example, I can't catch the high notes or melody of music played at Mass or on TV or the radio. Everything comes across like Judy Garland's "Clang, clang, clang went the trolley" - minus the trolley. In other words, music has degenerated into noise for me and so now I must be fitted out with up-to-date hearing aids if my life is to become all melody again.

Which makes me wonder, in relation to our appreciation of the Scripture read at our Sunday liturgies, whether we all might not need hearing aids - to catch its melody, to prevent it's becoming mere noise; in one ear and out the other as they say. I mean, what did you make of last Sunday's Gospel passage in which Jesus says, "No one knows the Father except the Son"? There's a similar line in St. John's Gospel that goes, "No one has ever seen God . . ." I think sometimes we forget that - strictly speaking - God by his very nature is beyond the grasp of our intellects and imagination. We are finite, indeed infinitesimally tiny creatures adrift in a universe of immense galaxies too boundless to fathom. So how much more must the Creator of those galaxies elude our comprehension?

Of course we try our best to describe God with words like omnipotent, infinite, eternal, holy, all-knowing or we imagine him as Father, Spirit, Lord, Shepherd, Judge or a Mighty Fortress or as riding upon the clouds in majesty or arriving before Moses amid thunder and lightning. And our tradition has always taught that these attempts to grasp God's nature in a word or image do in some way catch the hem of his garment, give us a glimpse of who and what he is. But every word or image we come up with might as well be compared to a small piece of stained glass, a bit of gold here or vermilion, blue or green there. And even if we were to arrange all these pieces of colorful glass together into an immense Rose Window, so that, as we stood beneath it, the nature of God might shine through it to bathe us in all the colors of a divine rainbow - still God himself would remain on the far side of that Rose Window as independently as the sun in all its splendor, too brilliant, too blinding a presence for any human eye to look upon.

And so John's Gospel is correct when it says, "No one has ever seen God." And so is Jesus when in last week's Gospel he says, "No one knows the Father, except the Son." But then he goes on to say, "And anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him." It's as if Jesus were saying, "Try as you might; marshal up all the words and images your finite minds can come up with; you'll never capture the essence of God - and especially if you think of God as big, powerful, awesome, stern, majestic, overwhelming, intimidating - as for example the Wizard of Oz whom Dorothy and her friends expected to appear as a Ball of Fire or Sphinx or an enormous disembodied head!"

But then Jesus goes on to say, "Don't despair, for I have come into your world to tell you God's essential secret. Do you want to know the best of all definitions of God, the one that will introduce you to his innermost Being, the very core of his radiance? Look at me; learn of me for I am gentle and humble of heart. Therein lies all that you need to know about God - that he is an imperturbable source of peace wherein, whatever your confusion, you may find comfort and forgiveness - an intimacy humble enough to take you as you are however much you may not like yourself."

Can you catch the melody of that Gospel reading now, beyond the clang, clang, clang of all those distractions, fears and low self-esteem that make you feel God is so very far away?

-- Geoff Wood