Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

I'm away right now at a conference on Christian Formation in Indianapolis, typing this on my mobile keyboard...so I hope you'll forgive any weird spellings or outlandish malapropisms that predictive text algorithms think are perfectly fine but can be rather stressful. Case in point: "stressful" there was supposed to be "surreal."

I couldn't resist making a brief comment, though, on our reading from Isaiah this morning. In particular, verse 15a says, "Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself." What an enigmatic verse! Jesus' statement in our Gosoel reading just yesterday about the intentional obscurity of his parables notwithstanding, there's a sense in the passage that what's being spoken of is not so much God's tendency to hide as God's tendency to be inscrutable. Why? God's ways are often hidden from us because God doesn't think or plan like we do, and so often our expectation is that God's ways will conform to ours. We become the standard of the divine will-at-work. But that ought not to be so. The invitation we're being given by the inscrutability of the Divine, is that we come to adjust our expectations toward wonder, mystery, holy surprise. If we attempt to grasp God by thinking God, what we'll be left with is an image, an idol, a divinized algorithm, ruthless in its predictability, lacking the wildness and mystery of love.

In fact, if we're to grasp God at all, it's through love (by which we're also grasped) and not by thinking. But don't take my word for it: here's the 6th chapter of the anonymous 14th Century English mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing. It's wonderful and could provide the basis for a lifetime of meditation...and I hope it will for you, dear Friend!

"But now you ask me, 'How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?' And to this I can only answer, 'I do not know.'
"For with your question you have brought me into that very darkness and that very cloud of unknowing that I want you to be in yourself. By grace it is possible to have full knowledge of all other created things and their works, and indeed of the works of God himself, and to think clearly about them, but of God himself no one can think. And so I wish to give up everything that I can think, and choose as my love the one thing that I cannot think. For he can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens."

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+