We live in a world full of noise and distraction. Sometimes our theological conversation can be noisy too. In the prayer journey I described earlier in the chapter, I arrived at a place where I was tired of talking. I wanted to sit in God’s presence. When words ran out, I wanted to taste and see. I desired encounters with God and wanted to participate with God rather than conjecture about him.
I desired intimacy. The good news of the gospel is that God desires divine-human intimacy more than I do. Christ made himself available to humanity—to the worst of sinners! To sinners like me and like you. The desire of God to be with his creation was fulfilled at the steepest of costs in the death of his Son.
Now God invites us into greater intimacy with himself in the form of bread and wine. Christ, in a real but mysterious way, is present to us in the Eucharist. We consume the mystery of Jesus and become consumed by him. We eat, and God becomes part of us. We are nourished by the bread that was consumed for us. God invites us to enter this great mystery through tasting. In the Lord’s Supper, we contemplate Christ. With eyes of faith, we see him in the Eucharist.
In the schema of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the sacraments are inherently tied to what they are used for, which, he argues, is making human beings holy.24 The Eucharist is a means to the beatific vision, seeing God. The bread and wine aren’t turned in on themselves but are turned upward to become a divine encounter.25 John McDermott describes the sacramental understanding as the realization that the “material world serves as a communicator of God to man and as a means of enabling him to attain the beautifying possession of God in His kingdom.”26 In a mysterious manner we take God within us. And Christ works on transforming us from the inside out.
CONCLUSION
Growing up, I loved Kobe Bryant. I joined his fan club, collected his trading cards, got his autograph, and went to see him play. I loved him, so I tried to resemble him. I worked on his iconic step-back fadeaway over and over. With the clock running out (in my imaginative mind), I attempted the iconic shot: Three! I dribbled around the defender. Two! I picked up the dribble. One! I made a jab step, did a fade, and shot—Kobe! Sometimes it went in. But Kobe was clutch. He made it all the time, I thought. I loved Kobe, so I tried to resemble him, even though I was a short, stocky white guy.
This is the way love works. We resemble what we love, even if the creature-Creator distinction is vast, even if sin plagues us. I saw Kobe only on a screen or from a distance in an arena. God invites us into his very life. He comes close to us in Christ. God wants us to spend time with him, to see him in his beauty, to contemplate him, to be transformed.
Often, I can view my life with a selfish lens. I can be so focused on Bible studies or ascetic practices or writing or reading theology that I neglect the goal. I think it’s all about me—about me becoming a certain type of person or having a skill set or knowledge base. But beauty takes me out of myself. It focuses me on a greater goal: union with God.
1. Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, 27. The idea is not original with Bonhoeffer. He quotes Cyril of Alexandria: “In silence I worship the unutterable.”
2. Berry, Jayber Crow, 182.
3. Eliot, Four Quartets, 13.
4. There’s a whole tradition of theology that emphasizes the silence and unknowability of God. It’s called the apophatic tradition, and it highlights the nonconceptual knowledge of God. As a commentary on the Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky, Rowan Williams writes, “The source and end of apophatic theology for Lossky is, therefore, a fully conscious (though non-intellectual) relationship of personal confrontation between man and God in love” (Wrestling with Angels, 13). Apophatic theology knows that our most eloquent and accurate words still fail to display the full beauty and being of God. God surpasses anything we might say about him. Even if we say God is love, which is thoroughly scriptural, our own idea of love is incompatible with the fullness of God’s love. So, in essence, we limit God to our own understanding rather than allow God to be mysterious and incomprehensible. There’s a further distinction that says we can speak about God with reference to the way he reveals himself in his energies or attributes (cataphatic theology). But God in his nature or essence will always be inaccessible (apophatic theology).
5. Bahnson, Soil and Sacrament, 17.
6. Merton, No Man Is an Island, 268.
7. Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, x.
8. Williams, Holy Living, 101–2.
9. Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II, 27.1.
10. Fujimura, Art and Faith, 7.
11. Gioia, “Christianity and Poetry.”
12. Merton, Course in Christian Mysticism, 47.
13. “Insofar as the veil over the face of Christ’s mystery is drawn aside, and insofar as the economy of grace allows, Christian contemplation can marvel, in the self-emptying of divine love, at the exceeding wisdom, truth and beauty inherent there. But it is only in this self-emptying that they can be contemplated, for it is the source whence the glory contemplated by the angels and the saints radiated into eternal life. . . . The humiliation of the servant only makes the concealed glory shine more resplendently, and the descent into the ordinary and commonplace brings out the uniqueness of him who so abased himself” (von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, 1:133–34).
14. Jensen, Substance of Things Seen, 21.
15. Lewis, Made for Heaven, 85–86.
16. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.20.7 (Keble, 444).
17. For a fuller treatment of Moses in Exodus, see Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses.
18. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, 114.
19. Lossky, Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 136.
20. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 6.11 (Keble, 449).
21. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 54.3 (Behr, 107).
22. The Orthodox tradition makes a distinction between the essence and energies of God. By becoming absorbed in the energies, we become God, though we never partake or share in God’s essence. His energies are his grace. We know God through his energies but have no access to his essence. On this, Michael Horton notes, “So there is deification without pantheism, union without fusion” (Horton, Christian Faith, 691).
23. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 128. There’s another quote credited to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, but I haven’t found documentation for it. Along Augustinian lines, it says, “What we love we shall grow to resemble.”
24. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica III.lx.2c and ad 1.
25. Boersma, “Sacramental Journey to the Beatific Vision,” 1021.
26. McDermott, Love and Understanding, 299.
8
The Road to Transformation and Union
ATTENTION, CONTEMPLATION, AND DETACHMENT
To pray is to pay attention or, shall we say, to “listen” to someone or something other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, he is praying.
—W. H. Auden, “Work, Carnival, Prayer”
