May God bless you, Deacon

A Thought on Faith and Conceptual Frameworks

Deacon Douglas McManaman

I’ve been visiting a man in hospital who has a serious infection that has deprived him of his ability to walk, and he’s been in a great deal of pain for years. He has assured me a number of times that we are not “on the same page” in terms of our worldview. In other words, this man does not believe in God, in the resurrection of Christ, in eternal life, nor will he permit me to pray any kind of blessing over him. He is a very intelligent man and not in any way irreverent or disrespectful, and I do enjoy sitting down with him and listening to him, especially his ideas on Paracelsus and toxicology. However, on a couple of occasions he has said to me: “May God bless you, Deacon”. He assured me that he does not mean this in the same way I understand those words, for in his mind, there is no God, but he still insists on uttering what seems to me to be a genuine blessing.

Well, the cat is out of the bag, at least in my mind. I certainly would not tell him that, but God is the unutterable mystery—we’ve been saying that for centuries (Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, Maimonides, Eckhart, Pascal, etc.). If we pause and think hard about this, what do we really know about God in the end? We may know something about what God is not (apophatic theology), but do we really think we adequately understand God’s relationship to creation, to my own mind, your mind, to the unconscious mind, to the collective unconscious, and what do we really know about God’s trinitarian nature? What I am really asking is to what degree does my concept of God and all that belongs to it correspond to what he actually is? I could ask a similar  and easier question: “To what degree does my concept of a human being correspond to the complete reality of the human person?” There is no doubt in my mind, after years of reflection upon my experience with human beings and my study of human nature, that my current understanding of “human being” is much richer than what it was decades ago, but there is also no doubt that my understanding is infantile compared to what there is to know about the mystery of the human person. How much more so is this the case when it comes to my concept of God and his relationship to me and everything else? God is infinitely knowable and thus incomprehensible, and so it would seem to follow that my current understanding, which is all wrapped up in a concept or collection of concepts, will forever shrink to a kind of nothingness next to the divine infinitude. In other words, my concept will always be, if not false, at least infinitely inadequate. 

This semi-paralyzed man does not work with the same conceptual equipment that I work with, and yet he is moved to say: “May God bless you, Deacon”. What does that mean? Must he possess the very same concepts that I possess, which refer to the unutterable mystery of God who we believe created all things and sustains all things, who revealed himself in the Person of Christ, etc., in order for him to know and respond to, at some level, something that not even he understands explicitly, namely the proximity of God himself? It would be foolish of me to insist on it, especially when I know that my own current conceptual framework and all its intelligible content is infinitely inadequate. Perhaps this is an instance of grace worming its way into his soul, as St. Edith Stein once wrote about [1]. Does this patient have to explicitly and consciously know that his suffering is a sharing in the suffering of Christ in order for it to be so? Does he have to explicitly and consciously offer his sufferings for the salvation of souls for his sufferings to be so offered and thus made spiritually fruitful? I would say no, not at all. In fact, all that is necessary is that God take the initiative and join a human nature to himself so as to be present to every human person and an implicit desire on this man’s part, rooted in an implicit knowledge of God’s proximity, that the best befall others—and God is certainly the best. It would seem that God has outwitted even the most rebellious, giving them what they ultimately want, which is himself, and on their terms. 

[1]. She writes: “All merciful love can descend upon anyone. We believe that it does. And now, should there be souls who exclude themselves from it permanently? In principle, the possibility is not excluded. In fact, it can become infinitely unlikely, precisely through what prevenient Grace is able to accomplish in the soul. This Grace can only knock, and there are souls that open themselves at even this quiet call. Others let it go unheeded. But then this Grace can worm its way into these souls, and more and more expand itself in them. The greater the space that it occupies in such an illegitimate way, the more unlikely it will be that the soul closes itself off. It already sees the world now in the light of Grace…The more ground that Grace wins from that which occupied it before, the more ground it deprives from the free acts directed against it. And, in principle, there are no limits to this displacement. When all the impulses against the spirit of light are displaced from the soul, then a free decision against it [the spirit of light] becomes infinitely unlikely. For this reason, the belief in the boundlessness of God’s love and Grace, as well as the hope for universal salvation, are justified…” Edith Stein, “Freiheit und Gnade” und weitere Beitrage zu Phanomenologie und Ontologie: (1917 bis 1937) (Freiburg: Herder, 2024), 158-159. Quoted in Christoph Wrembek, S. J. Hope for Judas: God’s Boundless Mercy for Us All. N.Y.: New York City Press, pp.148-149.