Thursday, February 20, 2025

Reflecting on Order and Quiet and Knowing God

Certainly the inscrutable nature of God is real. As well as His simplicity. And it seems, maybe, the order of a monastery, at least in the ideal, is an effort to arrange our real human lives as simply and plainly and orderly as possible so the seeking of the transcendent, necessarily inscrutable nature of God does not completely ruin us.

The contrast between us and God is off the charts. Is this why we are to live quietly and go about our business, why the east has this beautiful doctrine of apophaticism -- "We know what is not true of God but positive assertions we handle with great care -- all but complete silence?"

Perhaps this is why the ordering of quietness opens the door to awareness of God. Quietness, even when occurring naturally, gives room for the (to us) impossibly infinite God to be known in some small measure. And to know God in the smallest of ways is larger than a life. Busy-ness wars against such a thing, though certainly diligence does not, for it is the same kind of ordering I am searching to understand.

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