The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [54]
Knowing God is more important than knowing about God.
—Karl Rahner, S.J. (1904–1984)
For Christians, knowing God also means knowing a person: if you want to know more about God, learn more about Jesus. One reason that God became human was to show us more clearly what God was like. Jesus literally embodied God, and so anything you can say about Jesus you can say about God.
Here’s another way of looking at that, through the lens of the parable, a story from everyday life that opens up your mind to new ways of thinking about God.
The parable form is one of the primary ways in which Jesus of Nazareth communicates his understanding of elusive but important concepts. In Luke’s Gospel, for example, Jesus tells the crowd that one should treat one’s neighbor as oneself. But when he is asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus offers not a precise definition but instead spins out the story of the Good Samaritan, where the Samaritan man helps a neighbor in distress (Luke 10:29–37). When asked to explain what he means by the “Kingdom of God,” the central message of his preaching, Jesus offers short stories about mustard plants, wheat and weeds, and seeds falling on rocky ground (Mark 4).
Where a strictly worded definition closes down thought and can be shallow, a story opens the hearer’s mind and is endlessly deep. Stories carry meaning without having to be converted into a rigid statement. Parables also went against the normal expectations of the audience, as when the Samaritan, hailing from a hated ethnic group (at least for Jesus’ crowd), was ultimately revealed as the good guy who cares for the stranger.
In a sense, Jesus of Nazareth was a story told by God. As Jesus communicated spiritual truths through parables, you might posit the same about God the Father. In order to communicate an essential truth, God offered us a parable: Jesus.
Jesus is the parable of God. So for the Christian, if you want to learn about God, get to knowJesus.
You can also learn about God through the lives of holy men and women, and witness how God leads them to fulfill God’s dreams for the world.
For me, few things are more enjoyable than reading the lives of the saints, especially the Jesuit saints. When I read stories of how much they loved God, and how they experienced God’s love in their own lives, I learn more about the source of that love.
For example, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit and paleontologist who lived from 1881 to 1955, found God not simply in the celebration of the Mass and in the other more obvious duties of a priest, but in his work as a scientist and naturalist, work that took him around the globe. During his lifetime Teilhard wrote extensively about the interplay between science and religion. (For a time, his works were considered too controversial by the Vatican, which was suspicious of some of his new ways of speaking about God.)
Teilhard encountered God through many avenues, including the contemplation of nature. “There is a communion with God,” he wrote, “and a communion with earth, and a communion with God through earth.” When I first read that, it helped me better understand that experience I had on my bike on the way to elementary school. Teilhard understood that you can learn about God through the natural world, by seeing how God reveals beauty and order in the universe and is forever creating and renewing the physical world.
We can learn about God through the experiences of such holy men and women, as well as through the men and women themselves. Through them we can glimpse the transcendent. Not that they are divine. Rather, they are like a clean window through which the light of God can shine.
Closer to home than Teilhard de Chardin is a Jesuit named Joe. When I first met Joe, he was in his late sixties and was living with us in the novitiate as a “spiritual father,” a resource and example for the younger men.
Joe was one of the freest people I’ve ever known. Once, on a trip to visit some Jesuits in Kingston, Jamaica, his plane was delayed for five hours in Boston. Ultimately, the flight