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LEARNING

One of the most enjoyable parts of a new friendship is finding out about a friend’s background—discovering his hobbies and interests, hearing funny stories about his childhood and getting to know his joys and hopes. When two people fall in love, there is an even more intense desire to know the other person, which is another way of being intimate.

The same holds true in your relationship with God. Particularly in the early stages, you may feel a powerful desire to learn as much about God as possible. You find yourself thinking about God and wondering: What is God like? And how can I learn about God?

One of the easiest ways to discover answers to these questions is to listen to other people talk about their own experiences of God.

A few years ago, when I edited the book How Can I Find God? I received a beautiful essay from Sister Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking. She wrote, “The most direct road that I have found to God is in the faces of poor and struggling people.” Sister Helen talked about how working with the poor, specifically men and women on death row, had led her to places “beyond the part of us that wants to be safe and secure and with the comfortable and the familiar.”

Later in her essay Sister Helen offered the analogy of a boat on a river. When you begin to seek God, your sails fill up with wind, and your boat is taken to places that you may not expect. But prayer is an essential part of that journey. Your boat, she says, needs not only sails but a rudder, too. Sister Helen’s answer reminded me how much there is to learn about God through other people’s experiences of God.

Each essay taught me something new about God—for instance, I had never thought of God as a rudder. Letting others tell us about their experiences of God is like having a friend introduce us to one of her friends. Or like discovering something new about an old friend.

Another way of learning about God is through Scripture. One of my favorite essays in that same book is by Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., who teaches New Testament at Boston College and was one of my favorite professors during theology studies. In his essay he told a moving story about coming to know God.

When Harrington was a little boy, he stuttered. At age ten, he read in a newspaper that Moses stuttered, too. He looked it up in the Book of Exodus, and, sure enough, Moses says to God, “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” The boy read the rest of the story in Exodus (chap. 4), which tells how God promised to be with Moses and ultimately liberated the people of Israel.

“I read that story over and over,” wrote Harrington, “and it gradually worked upon me so that it has shaped my religious consciousness to this day. As a boy of ten or eleven years of age I found God in the Bible, and I have continued to do so ever since.”

But there was more to the story than that. As a Scripture scholar, Harrington now spends a great deal of time studying and teaching the Bible. As a priest, he preaches on the Bible. And sometimes, “in the midst of these wonderful activities . . . I occasionally stutter.”

Then he makes this connection:

And this brings me back to where my spiritual journey with the Bible began. Though I am slow of speech and tongue like Moses, I still hear the words of Exodus 4:11–12: “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.”

Scripture is an ancient path to knowledge of God. First, reading Scripture helps to inspire us, in the literal sense of that word—placing God’s spirit into us. Second, Scripture tells us about the history of God’s relationship with humanity, and therefore it tells us something about God. Third, it tells of the ways that people throughout that history—from the Old Testament prophets to the apostles to St. Paul—related to God. In Scripture you see God relating to you, to humanity and to individuals. In all these ways Scripture helps you to come to