And what have I now said, my God, my life, my holy joy? or what saith any when he speaks of Thee? Yet woe to him that speaketh not, since mute are even the most eloquent (Confessions, Book I).
Most of us assume we know what we mean – and what others mean – when we/they use the name “god.” We’re wrong. It isn’t true. One shouldn’t ask – it is futile to ask, if one is concerned with truth – “Do you believe in god?” As N.T. Wright says, if someone claims not to believe in god, we should ask of her, “Which god is it you do not believe in?” No two of us mean the same thing when we use that word, even if there is much that overlaps in our understandings. What I mean when I use that word now may differ considerably – and will differ somewhat – from what I mean when I use it here. That’s not hyperbole; it is a fact we must come up against, and face for what it is.
Augustine’s questions should haunt us, should goad and prick us, drive us up a wall. Otherwise, we’ll go on presuming - an (almost?) incurable sin. What have we said when we’ve spoken of god? What do we mean when we speak of ourselves as believers in god as our father/creator/judge/savior? Even more importantly, we should put to ourselves – and to others, though always afterward – the question Augustine asks of God (and himself, necessarily at the same time) later in the Confessions: “What then do I love, when I love my God?” That is the theological question, par excellence.
In spite of what one might think, such a question is not beyond us. It is not too heady for us. Not too academic or theoretical or abstract. It is awe-fully concrete and carries the most practical consequences. It is a question we should and (perhaps) must put to ourselves, now or later. I will not say we can ever answer it. We’ll never, ever get to anything like a final answer. But we can begin to answer it, and we can go on asking it, reflecting on it, and attempting a sort of provisional answering. And that, I believe, is enough. That is worshipful and obedient.
In a brief but illuminating (pun intended) essay entitled “Meditations in a Toolshed,” C.S. Lewis contrasts two ways of seeing: “looking at” and “looking along.” In it, he describes entering a dark toolshed in which he could observe a beam of light burning through a space in the boards. He could look “at” this light, see the motes dancing in the sunbeam, or he could approach the light, stand in it, and look “along” it, out through the space in the boards to the world outside. Lewis uses this image to talk about epistemology. I want to use it somewhat differently, for I think it gives me a way to speak to what (in part) I mean when I say/think/hear/pray “god.”
Is god something we do/shall look “at”? Or is god something we do/shall look “along”? Are we meant to see god and in seeing god find ourselves? Or are we meant to see by and through and in god? Beatific (blissful) vision names the direct, unmediated gazing upon the triune god. But the beatific vision includes seeing others, ourselves – all reality – mediated by god? God is that both at which we are meant to look and along which we are meant to see. He is both a mirror and a window, a lover and a hiding place for lovers, a ship and a sea.
What difference does this make? I believe it makes all the difference in the world (and the world to come). “Heaven” will not be an endless “worship service” hosted in some oddly-shaped city far off in outer space. We are not going to stand side by side in neatly arranged rows, singing psalms and strumming harps, all of us awestruck and mesmerized by an enthroned being of perfect beauty. That imagery, both in Scripture and theology, is precisely that, and should be taken metaphorically, as suggestive of an (as yet) unthinkable reality. For one thing, the “world to come” is the perfection and purgation of this world, of our world, of us and our work. It will be no less corporeal, no less temporospatial than this one – though cleansed of the corruption and corrupted finitude which now holds sway. The “world to come” arrives here and now when this world comes into itself – by god’s act on our behalf, and not without our participation. In that “world to come” we’ll not only look at God, but will see by God – see everything for the first time as it is really; we’ll see truthfully because perfectly lovingly. And now already, even though it is not yet here, we should begin to seek to see that way. This is what it means to see “in Christ.”
Hopkins’ “Kingfishers” speaks of seeing God through others:
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Christ is in the poor, the marginalized, the humbled, the cast-out and over-looked. To see “the least of these” is to see Christ, for his face is there in their faces. In them, the Father beholds the Son, the Beloved.
And there’s more: Christ’s playing works the other way, too. For the “features of men’s faces” are lovely not only to the Father, but also through the Father. It is that, more than anything else, that makes the Father, the Father! And it is not just the ”just” who are seen so. It is precisely the un-just who are so seen. That is what makes Jesus, Christ!
