Our knowledge of God is participatory. God refuses to be intellectually “thought,” and is only known in the passion and pain of it all, when the issues become soul-sized and worthy of us. Saint Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510), a laywoman and mystic, is supposed to have asked Jesus, in one of her locutions, why there is so much pain and suffering on the earth. Jesus responded that, if there was any other way, he would have thought of it.
