Piankitank Priest

Third Sunday of Easter

April 22, 2012

Luke 24: 35-48                                                          

The disciples had a personal experience of Christ.

But what are our chances?

One of our greatest Catholic spiritual writers, Karl Rahner, wrote: "Very soon, all Christians will be mystics — or they will not believe at all."

This is not some bumper-sticker threat.

It is a profound theological insight that requires some serious thought on our part.

By being a mystic, Fr. Rahner does not mean that we must have visions or ecstatic experiences.

People are differently wired, so their emotional responses differ.

But God is always the same, so what do we experience when we experience God?

It is necessarily like no other experience because God is like nothing else.

God is bigger than our brains, so we cannot fit God into our minds.

God is larger than our hearts, so we cannot embrace God in our arms.

God is beyond anything we can know or love.

God is Holy Mystery, so we can experience God only as a mystery, in a mysterious way.              

We have to arrive at God sideways, glancing off things, seeing through events, loving different beings.

Absolutely everything we know, we know in some context, against a larger background.

We know a tree within a forest within a world within a universe.

And there we are stymied, because we cannot know beyond what we know.

We cannot even imagine it.

All of our knowledge ends in mystery.

Some call it God.

This means that we know God by knowing other things; we love God by loving other things.

That feels like a letdown.

But the upside is that we actually know and love God every time we know or love any thing.

We experience God at the same time, within, on the deeper level of every experience.       

Which means that we must pay attention, we must be on the lookout for God.

 God is a background presence that is easily overlooked as we pursue superficial activities.

God is something like the air we breathe without noticing air as a real thing in itself.

God is something like the sun we ignore while looking at the things illuminated by the sun.

God is something like the horizon against which we see everything without being able to see the horizon itself.

God feels so absent because God is so very present.

We can easily miss God because God is everywhere, unobtrusively.

Someone said that God graciously reduces Godself to make room for other things.

 That's a clever image, but not quite correct.

God does not make room for things,

God is the room where everything fits.

God is equally present in a sunset or earthquake whether we pay attention or not

God is there in a depression or inflation no matter what the market thinks.

God is there during a birth or an abortion even if we don't notice.

God is present in every joy and sorrow and utter boredom, not in addition to them, but inside them.

God is hard to miss because God is everywhere all the time.

But God is also missed because God is hidden in every thing and event.

We must learn to experience God in everyday life or we will not experience God at all.

We will be mystics or we will be unbelievers.

As the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: "Every bush is afire with God. Those who see it, take off their shoes;

the rest sit round and eat blackberries."

More prosaically: "The cosmos is aglow with the glory of God.

Those who see it bask in the sunlight; those who don't, slather on sunscreen."