The Question of...

02.08.07
8:52 am

God.

Some say you must know God in order to know yourself. Others say you must know yourself before you can know God. In posing this question, we enter an inherent paradox. That is, the infinite in a finite medium. What is infinite? God is infinite. What is finite? I am finite.

∞

Imagine you're standing on a beach somewhere in California. Look to your left. Sand. Look to your right. Sand. The sun is beating down. Beads form at your brow. You look down at your hand and pinch the tweezers you are holding. You ponder the enormous task before you. Counting the grains of sand. It may take a thousand years.

And yet this is not infinite.

When you have finished you have only just begun to understand yourself.

If knowing yourself is like counting grains of sand. Knowing God is like digging a hole to China with a sieve. I ask you. At the end of the day. The man with the sieve who tries earnestly to reach his goal. Who does he better understand? Who has he grown closer to? God or himself?

Earnest searching always brings one closer to oneself. Regardless of the success or failure of the search. There are those, however, who find without searching. Who step to the threshold and find the door already gaping. Who find themselves atop Mt. Carmel without ever scraping their knees on the climb. Those born with the blessing and those greedy deceivers alike. By fortune or by folly, their path to God has revealed little to them of themselves.

And it is those I fear. For they need not to bless themselves, they already taste the oil of anointing dripping from their bangs.


But this is irrelevant is it not? This fathoming of the fathomless. An arrogant human approach to a divine problem. Ah you fallen man. How your pride doth blind you. You have, on your shelf, a finite recording of infinite proportion. The Holy Writ, The Scriptures, The Word of God, The Book, The Bible. The solution lies within. The Bible is a set of eyeglasses, with a prescription from God.

Ah yes. But perhaps God gave me a bicycle, which I mistook it for eyeglasses. How would He ever tell me?

Perhaps God gave me a rake, and I mistook it for a toothbrush.

Perhaps God gave me a gun and I mistook it for a telephone.

The Holy Spirit? That great ghost that wonders to and fro, weaving webs in your self, entangling indoctrination, guilt, and self will. The voice of the true believer. I never understood this Holy Spirit. Who speaks to us, telling us only what we already know. Confirming everything that has already been said. Seems a redundancy perhaps?

Yet even should it speak to us.
How can we discern its voice unless we are already familiar with our own?
How can we understand what God gave us, until we first understand what we need?
And how can we understand what we need without first understanding ourselves?
And how can we understand ourselves without first seeking our selves?

And how can we seek our selves?


Earnestly.