Thursday of the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time

The Responsorial Verse exhorts us to give God “Glory and praise forever” (Daniel 3: 52-56). 

St. Augustine said, “We cannot love what we do not know.” So the level of our praise and love will be determined by the level of our knowledge of God: the more we know him, the more we will appreciate him. 

However, we can know what we do not see. In fact, if we only know what we see, that is superficial knowledge. We say, “Appearances deceive.” With God, we know that anything we can perceive with senses, understand with intellects, or resonate to with emotions will conceal as much as it reveals of his total Truth, Goodness, and Being. So human beings throughout history have sought to know God by in some way “rising above” the normal, human ways of knowing and experiencing. Those whose experience we find credible, we call “mystics.”  

The mystics are those who, apparently, are able, through years of rigorous asceticism and intense meditation, to rise above the particled atmosphere of our human orbit, where we see only by light reflected off of creatures, and arrive at the undistorted emptiness of outer space, where there is nothing but pure Light and utter darkness. 

This is a misleading description of mysticism based on common false assumptions. But it faces us with the basic question: “Since God’s truth is infinitely beyond us, do we go up to God or does God come down to us?” If we can only love what we know, how can we praise God as he deserves, for what he truly is? 

This puts Exodus 19: 1-20 in perspective. The truth is, we meet halfway, “on the mountain.” God “comes down” to us, but we must “go up” to listen to his words. The problem is, most people won’t “go up.” They prefer to remain on ground level, “at the foot of the mountain,” while their appointed ministers go up to talk to God and come back to tell them what he says. 

Matthew 13: 10-17 explains that God’s truth is not something just anyone can receive and absorb. On “ground level,” we are subject to too much distortion from our cultural conditioning, our unexamined attitudes, and our unsorted desires (see Sunday 15’s Gospel). So to spare us the illusion of thinking we understand when we don’t, Jesus speaks in parables that force us to think. But if we “separate” from our culture in prayer and “go up the mountain,” we will see and be able to enlighten others. Christian ministers are “mystics of the mountain top.” We don’t have to go to outer space; just meet God on the mountain top and give “Glory and praise forever.” 

Initiative: Be a priest. Go to the mountain to see God, and return to share.

— Fr. David M. Knight

View today’s Mass readings, Lectionary #398, on the USCCB website here

Fr. David M. Knight (1931-2021) was a priest of the Diocese of Memphis in Tennessee, a prolific writer, and a highly sought after confessor, spiritual director, and retreat master. He authored more than 40 books and hundreds of articles that focus primarily on lay spirituality and life-long spiritual growth.