Why God Can't Be Understood

We are part of an evolving reality grounded in a divine harmony that pervades reality and draws everything into patterns of increasing complexity and centeredness.

You and I are bathed in the original mystery of order coming out of chaos.

Our minds, as we try to understand this order, are part of the very process of the emerging order. Consciousness is the world order at its cutting edge.

Our lives, as we grow toward wholeness and harmony, are a reflection of the harmony of the mystery that is what much of the East speaks of as the Void.

Though the mainstream of our scientific and academic institutions, with their emphasis on the Universe as a machine, have tended to recognize no self bathed in mystery––no self that is partner to everything in a single mystery of structured emergence––the reality is that we experience meaning as we align ourselves with the growth toward harmony that is embedded in reality.

So while many Western religious folk argue about the literalness or figurativeness of the Genesis days of creation, Ed Agrestra said wisely, “Don’t count the days, make the days count.”

Since the divine belongs exclusively to the background, the experience of life is the only access we have to the mystery that underlies creation.

It is an immediate access that can’t be understood. That is, it can’t be the subject of an insight issuing in a verifiable scientific hypothesis. It is known only in an inner, wordless way.

The evidence for the reality of the divine is something that happens in our heart and our life as we open ourselves up to the process of growth.

Something in us reaches for our expansion. Something in us senses that we are more than we yet know ourselves to be. Something in us longs to become more than we yet are.

In other words, we know the sacred in the movement of our own heart as it stretches out to the infinite.

It also seems to me that the human heart experiencing the sacred has a peacefulness and sureness that isn’t present otherwise—at least, that is my experience.

As Angelus Silesius put it, “The clearer I perceive that which is True, the less reasoning, judging, arguing I can do.”