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God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped, he would not be God.1 Evagrius of Pontus
God is “the wholly Other”, invisible, inconceivable, radically transcendent, beyond all words, beyond all understanding.
“A God who is comprehensible is not God.” A God, that is to say, whom we claim to understand exhaustively through the resources of our reasoning brain turns out to be no more than an idol, fashioned in our own image. Such a “God” is most emphatically not the true and living God of the Bible and the Church. Man is made in God's image, but the reverse is not true.
“He is both the inn at which we rest for a night and the final end of our journey.”
The Greek Fathers liken man's encounter with God to the experience of someone walking over the mountains in the mist: he takes a step forward and suddenly finds that he is on the edge of a precipice, with no solid ground beneath his foot but only a bottomless abyss. Or else they use the example of a man standing at night in a darkened room: he opens the shutter over a window, and as he looks out there is a sudden flash of lightning, causing him to stagger backwards, momentarily blinded. Such is the effect of coming face to face with the living mystery of God: we are assailed by dizziness; all
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We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder. Quoting Psalm 8:1, “O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is thy name in all the earth”, St Gregory of Nyssa states: “God's name is not known; it is wondered at.”5
There is no life without prayer. Without prayer there is only madness and horror.
So his life ends. In the eyes of his spiritual children he was already perfect; but in his own eyes he was still at the very beginning.
Ignorance and sin are characteristic of isolated individuals. Only in the unity of the Church do we find these defects overcome. Man finds his true self in the Church alone; not in the helplessness of spiritual isolation but in the strength of his communion with his brothers and his Saviour.6
It is of course true that there are many who with their conscious brain reject Christ and his Church, or who have never heard of him; and yet, unknown to themselves, these people are true servants of the one Lord in their deep heart and in the implicit direction of their whole life. God is able to save those who in this life never belonged to his Church.
"I have sheep that are not of this fold."
"And though you thlught you worshipped Tash, you were actually worshipping me." 😇😈
But while God is not bound to the sacraments, we are bound to them.
It is above all through Communion that the Christian is made one with and in Christ, “christified”, “ingodded” or “deified”; it is above all through Communion that he receives the firstfruits of eternity. “Blessed is he that has eaten the Bread of love which is Jesus”, writes St Isaac the Syrian. “While still in this world, he breathes the air of the resurrection, in which the righteous will delight after they rise from the dead.”7
