The Recognition of God

Have you ever had the experience of encountering something – or someone – for the first time, and yet feeling as though you had somehow always known it, or them?

Perhaps you were listening to a piece of music you have never heard before, and something felt immediately familiar. Perhaps you were standing in a place you have never been before, and felt inexplicably at home there. Perhaps you met someone for the first time and felt an unexpected familiarity, a sense of ease, as though you were renewing an old friendship rather than beginning a new one.

Coming home

Many people when they first experience our ancient way of meditation speak of a sense of coming home. It’s not uncommon for someone to hear a wisdom teaching of the Christian contemplative tradition for the first time and say, ‘I knew it!’ Experiences like these are difficult to describe. They feel less like a discovery, and more like a recognition.

Meditation can certainly feel like the discovery of something new. But it is better understood as a gradual process of uncovering and recognition. Not about going somewhere else, or obtaining something that has been missing, but coming home to what has always been present, awakening to what has always been true.

In his work On the Trinity, Augustine makes a remarkable observation: ‘You cannot love what you do not know.’ (1)

At first sight, the statement seems self-evident. We don’t go shopping for something that doesn’t exist. We don’t generally love someone whose existence we know nothing about. We can love someone because, in some mysterious sense, we already know the deepest truth of who they are.

Why do we seek God, Augustine asks?

His answer is as simple as it is astonishing. We seek God because we already know God. We just might not know that we know. We seek the One who has known from before the foundation of the cosmos, whose love for us has no beginning and no end (Ephesians 1:4

To paraphrase St Paul, at present we see indistinctly, as if in a mirror, in a mystery, but we will come to see face to face; at present we know partially, but we shall come to know fully, to know as we have been known (1 Corinthians 13:12). However partial it may be, to know something or someone is to participate in God’s infinite knowing. As Meister Eckhart put it:

‘The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love.’ (2)

We know the One we seek

Think about this in relation to ordinary, everyday experience. We can only speak of losing or finding a coin because we know what a coin is. We can search for a friend in a crowd, only because we know our friend’s face and can recognise them.  Without this prior knowing we would have no idea what or who were we were looking for, and so the search could never begin! We can only search for what we know, for what we have already known. We can only love what we already know.

If we seek God, says Augustine, it is because, however clouded our awareness may be, we already know the One we seek. A recognition is taking place, whether we recognise that we are recognising or not. Our longing, our seeking for God is therefore not evidence of God’s absence. It is evidence of God’s presence.  It is God’s presence that calls us to become present to God’s presence.

Who is absent? Us or God?

Notice the movement. God was not absent. Augustine was absent. Or perhaps we should say, Augustine’s awareness had become absorbed elsewhere. His knowledge of God lay hidden beneath distraction, habit, attachment, the continual movement and noise of the mind.

This understanding has profound implications for how we understand and approach meditation and all prayer. Meditation is not about acquiring new information about God, or attempting to manufacture a relationship with God. We begin within a relationship that already exists. We practice within the presence of God. Julian of Norwich reminds us that God is the ground of our prayer. (4) We pray within the One who prays within us.

Augustine’s insight is not an isolated one. It echoes through the Gospel of John, where Jesus repeatedly speaks of mutual indwelling, of knowing and oneness.

What does Jesus say?

‘I have been with you this whole time, and still you do not know me?’ says Jesus (John 14:9). ‘…you will know that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ (John 14:20). ‘Dwell in me, as I dwell in you’ (John 15:4). ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever dwells in me, and I in them, will bear much fruit’ (John 15:5). ‘Dwell in my love’ (John 15:9).

‘I pray…that all may be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us… And I have given them the glory [the light] you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me, that they might be brought to perfection as one’ (John 17:21-23).

Over and over again, we are invited to awaken to the communion that is the fundamental nature of reality. While the process of meditation can feel like the discovery of something new, it is better understood as a gradual process of recognition, within a gradual process of uncovering. We allow the obscuring clouds to fall away.

Our capacity to know God is part-and-parcel of what it means to be human. Our being is naturally oriented towards God, because God is our being. Our being is a homing-beacon beckoning us home.

Why do we seek God, Augustine asks? We seek God because we already know God. We just might not know that we know. We seek the One who has known from before the foundation of the cosmos, whose love for us has no beginning and no end.

It is God’s presence that calls us to become present to God’s presence.

That is why we meditate.