The Way of Knowing God

Of course there are many ways to know God - prayer, participating in ritual and liturgy, spiritual reading…but there’s a specific way to engage reality that can, in fact, orient one, and invite a relationship with, the very living God.

These excerpts from Esther Lightcap Meek, “A Little Manual for Knowing” will explain how we can adopt a posture that will bring us into contact with God.

“Where we have presumed that reality is impersonal, of course this seems an unwarranted superimposition. But why should we think that reality is, first, impersonal?

 We love in order to know. Love, not bare information amassing, should characterize the way we relate to the world.

“The loving-to-know approach helps us notice and take seriously some things that in our heart of hearts we sense have everything to do with knowing—things that the knowledge-as-information approach doesn’t accredit or allow, and therefore can’t tap: things like desire, wonder, notice, and self-giving.”

“ It is a kind of receptive waiting that humbly consents to the being of, and invites the coming of, the as yet hidden real. But this emptied waiting is a pledged self-giving….Love is the gift of the self. It takes a gift of the self in order to know.”

“What starts the venture is notice and wonder. Something about reality catches our attention. To start to know is actually first a response to a dimly heard beckoning of the wonder-full real. If we can see knowing as a relationship between knower and known, we can see that reality makes the first overture. We can associate this call with our sense of wonder. ”

“To notice and wonder at something is itself a highly sophisticated act that must occur for you to come to know. You actively attend to something significant. You assign value to it as something to notice, picking it out from a background. And you must consent to the wonder, give yourself to it, responding hospitably to its overture. This seemingly tiny first response is big with sophisticated interpersonhood.

We can and should cultivate wonder—a posture of wonder. This is a trained readiness to be astounded.

“Not even a solitary knower is ever entirely solitary. A solitary knower has already appropriated a language, a culture, a tradition. Each knower has submitted to authoritative guides in order to be taught or trained. Each has embraced a shared way of seeing the world. Each has acquired skill sets and formal theoretical frameworks.”

“Out of our distinct love, we notice distinct aspects of reality, and reality responds to us along the lines of our distinctive care.”

“The goal is no longer comprehensive, mystery-eliminating, reality-denuding information. The goal is communion—the communion of knower and known. Communion is the fulfillment of love. The goal is ongoing friendship. Friendship requires our ongoing pledge.”

“No pledge, no ed[ge] . . . ucation”

“Any knowing venture requires the knower to take responsibility for it, to pledge him or herself to it. Commitment is the way we dispose ourselves toward the thing we want to know. We take a responsible, highly sophisticated, human, step of choice to bind ourselves in covenant with it. Commitment is different from curiosity, if we mean by curiosity an indifferent, uninvested, responsibility-free stance.”

“We pledge to give ourselves to the yet-to-be-known, and to consent to its being. We pledge to take the risk to follow something that may prove not to be there, something that may prove to be way different from what we imagine. ”

“We pledge also to open ourselves to the transformation and to the new reality that the yet-to-be-known will bring us. We must be willing to have it change us, without specifying or holding at arm’s length the change we will undergo. ”

“love and pledge. These defining postures frame the knowing venture and anchor inviting the real”

“In the Void, we must cry out in hope for the gracious deliverance and inbreaking of new being. This is a key act of inviting the real. ”

“We begin to move from deep hurt and need, choosing to move beyond shutting down, to reach out beyond ourselves, to the possibility of new being, and invite its gracious involvement.”

“Personal wholeness comes when we accept the gracious prospect of new being and become able to give ourselves in love. Mutual gift giving is the being-in-communion that full humanness is.”

“There is one big thing that this involves, something a knowledge-as-information mode utterly overlooks: our body. ”

“We have to indwell and bodily feel that response. It’s not enough to know what it is; we must know what it feels like in our bodies. It is not mindless processing of opaque information.”

“Learning to identify, care for, trust, and tap our felt body sense is a key to effective knowing ventures. ”

Welcome -

Inviting the real, then, includes maturing in love. Greatly beloved lovers make great knowers. They can bring to the knowing situation the kind of welcome that invites the real. Welcome is the key posture of a knower wooing the yet-to-be-known.”

“It is gracious consent to the being and presence of the yet-to-be-known other.”

“It is a space that accords dignity and liberty to the other. ”

“In the welcoming space the host must be disposed toward the other, and at the other’s disposal. ……Respect, humility, attentiveness, obedience to the other’s desires, and patience, all characterize the good host. All these are gestures of welcome that furnish the hospitable space. So they are important practices to invite the real.”

“Strategy 2: Placing ourselves where reality is likely to show up”

“Indwelling involves empathetically putting ourselves inside the thing we want to know and taking it inside us.”

“We should see our knowing venture as born of wonder and love and constituted in pledge. In it we extend hospitable welcome to invite the real. We cultivate ourselves as knowers in the maturity of love that readies us for knowing, maturing to give ourselves in love as candidates to romance the real. We comport ourselves as gracious hosts, in humility, attentiveness, and obedient response. We strategize in our choice of guides. We seek out a vantage point to which the real may come. We cultivate active attentiveness and listening that evokes the real. And we seek to indwell and be indwelt by the yet-to-be-known.”

“indwelling involves empathetically putting yourself inside the thing you want to know, and taking it inside you. Indwelling is a strategy to invite the real. Indwelling is what it looks like to give oneself in love in an effort to know. It is part of what welcome looks like, what trust looks like, and caring attentiveness.”

“what indwelling looks like is this: relying on clues “subsidiarily” to shape a complex focal pattern.

“Before the outset of our venture, we are looking at an apparently disconnected, meaningless array of particular items. Yet our love- and pledge-motivated wonder, our unspecifiable sense of a deeper meaning and of future prospects, our inexplicable excitement, our puzzlement over a problem, hint of a hidden reality. This, our already longing and loving to know, is itself signposting, and thus becoming subsidiary to a farther, half-hidden focus.”

This is an act of trust and submission, rather than a matter of indifferently amassing already lucid information. ”

“We have to find a way to empathetically put ourselves inside the yet-to-be-known—to indwell it. We are probing to make sense of the situation, to connect the dots. ”

“But our struggling to indwell the clues in a way that invites the real is itself a strategy to invite the real. And then, although there is no guarantee, we may find ourselves graciously blessed with integration—with insight and understanding.”

“It is a moment of communion in which we are intimate with the object of our quest. Our love invited the real; the real comes into our love and flourishes there. The relationship we have with it is invested, compassionate, connected. It’s not a mercenary help-yourself.”

“Reality is not passive, indifferent, collectible information tidbits. It is dynamic, generous, always surprisingly new. It responds to overtures of love. We hold a special place in its regard: we could say it wants to be known by us”

“And it is less like it answers our question and more like it reshapes the question. It changes our reality more than fitting into it. Rather than it fitting into our sense of what makes sense, it fits us into its sense of what makes sense. ”

Pledge-based verification

“We never replace the loving-in-order-to-know orientation or revert to a knowledge-as-information model. Truth isn’t a bare collection of obvious facts. It is a profession of allegiance—a highly sophisticated, pledge-like human act. Proof doesn’t begin a journey, and it doesn’t end it either. Rather, responsible pledge figures in to the journey accompanying the vast range of subsidiary clues on which we rely.

“A profound discovery doesn’t so much answer our questions as reshape our questions. It reshapes the way we see the world and the inquiry we pursue from that point on. A pilgrimage of knowing can be a journey of course corrections. We may have begun facing west, so to speak; gradually we find ourselves facing another direction, moving toward an endpoint that we could in no way have imagined at the outset.

So insights recalibrate our coordinates as we pursue our knowing venture. Each fresh perspective is one that accords more harmoniously with the world. The knower has been transformed to dwell in deeper communion with the yet-to-be-known.”

“Keeping this very human, relational, ceremonial dimension in mind keeps our knowing balanced on the keel of love. We honor and invite a person-like reality through our gentle, pledge-like overture…

All this underscores the idea of etiquette. Our knowing ventures can be rendered more effective, we have seen, by identifying, and practicing with intentionality, the pledge that constitutes a venture, and the etiquette appropriate to persons.”

“Each move is a gesture of hope—in hope of gracious response. Each partner has to be okay being off balance for a time, and waiting for and trusting the upcoming move of the partner.

This is the dynamic of the knowing venture, also. We bind ourselves in pledge and discipline to the inquiry; but we wait in hope for insight. We may not presume. What comes is often not exactly what we anticipated, and we find that is perhaps better. We move forward again, taking a risk that our effort will be rewarded, and waiting to see if it is.”

“To say, “Welcome!” is a very personable, highly sophisticated “let there be.” Creating a hospitable space confers liberty along with dignity—liberty for the yet-to-be-known to make itself known truly. It takes welcome and liberty to avoid a pressure that compels a skewed disclosure or issues in no response at all.”

“ The goal of knowing is not complete information; it is communion.

If we think that knowledge is so much information to amass, then the goal of knowing is comprehensive information. We surmise that this isn’t possible, and so we can feel that we are condemned, like Sisyphus, to the journey. However, an epistemology of love transforms our outlook”

“We can choose knowledge as information, indifferently, impersonally, passively amassed, to the end of a comprehensive package. Or we can choose the posture of loving in order to know, and knowing to the end of communion.”

“Is a vision of life, of reality, as finally about love and shalom something that we can believe? Or are we compelled to think that ultimately reality is personless, meaningless, chaotic, warring? The latter is well-suited to seeking power and domination.

But the vision of shalom cannot be false, if it is to be itself. We have to really think this in order to seek it. Is it wishful thinking? Yes, definitely. But it is not delusional. It is true—not in the sense of correct, certain information. It is true in the sense of troth. Troth is the old word for a pledge or covenant. We pledge to this vision of life. It is true in the sense of a T-square or a plumbline. This vision brings reality in line with itself. In this we recognize knowing’s necessary dimension of covenant. We choose to be . . . true.”