‘Be still and know that I am God’ Psalm 46

The dichotomy that we face is that God must by his very nature be unknowable and beyond the scope of human reasoning. If we could understand God then clearly he wouldn’t be God. Yet we are hard drived to ask questions and seek answers in order to try and understand the universe that surrounds us and our place in creation. As I’ve written before I think God provides us with many signposts that point to his true nature: the act of creation,science,empathy, conscience and so on culminating with the greatest revelation of his being of all, the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed the birth of Jesus is the ultimate recognition that God too struggles with ‘explaining the ways of God’ to man as ‘ my ways are not your ways’. Will we ever know the nature of God? Maybe after death but I like to think that one of God’s greatest gifts to mankind is the power of reason and the ability of man to read Gods handwriting in his creation.He has left the path to knowledge open for us to follow.

Meanwhile what can we do? I think the church fills its services with too much movement and noise and fails to recognize the need to give congregations times of silence , peace and contemplation which are needed to allow the unknowable to know us and fill us with his spirit.We may not be able to describe the exact nature of God in words or writings but we can all feel his spiritual presence ‘when I pass all my children know me’. There must be times when organized religion stops trying to provide all the answers to the whys? The answers are not ours to know .Let us ‘be still’ and accepting and invite God into our being.