How Should We Understand God?

[let_go_let_God]

I am currently reading On Heaven and Earth. It is a dialogue between Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio, (now Pope Francis) and Abraham Skorka, the rector of the Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I am only a few chapters in but they bring up many great points but a good one for our discussions here.

 

"... we can say what G-d is not, but we can never be sure what G-d is. We can talk about His qualities and attributes, but in no way can we describe His form." - Abraham Skorka 

 

"Rabbi, you said one thing, which in part, is certain: we can say what God is not, we can speak of His attributes, but we cannot say what He is. That apophatic dimension, which reveals how I speak about God, is critical to our theology. The English mystics speak a lot about this theme. There is a book by one of them, from the thirteenth century, The Cloud of Unknowing, that attempts again and again to describe God and always finishes pointing to what He is not. The mission of theology is to reflect and explain religious facts, and among them, God. I would also classify as arrogant those theologies that not only attempted to define with certainty and exactness God's attributes, but also had the pretense of saying who He was." - Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio

 

When we speak about God we often are using absolutes in our dialogues. Do we mean to use absolutes in God's attributes or do we try to define God with our limited understanding and knowledge? How then should we work to best understand God?

 

God bless-

LGLG

[AccountDeleted]

How then should we work to best understand God?

 

 

 

 

By loving Him... becoming one with Him... or as Ven John of St Samson, O Carm mystic wrote:

 

"Such is the effect of love's flood rushing into its lovers. It sweeps them away, ravishes them, and swamps them in its waves. These people become love itself — its spirit, its divinity — insofar as it is possible for any creature in this life."

 

"Aspiring, therefore, is not merely an affective conversation, a good exercise in itself. … Aspiring is therefore an expression of love: a love so purely and radically expressed that it transcends all loves that are comprehensible by the senses, reason, or the intellect. By the impetuosity and force of the of the Spirit of God, it arrives at union with God, not by chance but by a sudden transformation of the spirit in God. In this, I say, the Holy Spirit goes beyond all the love that can be understood and comprehended in the abundant ineffable sweetness of God Himself, in Whom it is amorously immersed."