I want you to empty your mind of all preconceived notions of God. I only use the word God because I have to use some word.
We do not so much understand God as we are understood by God. Our minds cannot be too terribly illuminated about God; they can however be illuminated by God.
An anonymous mystic in the 14th Century wrote a book called The Cloud of Unknowing. He explains that while religious people generally love God through the mediation of things in this world (statues, crosses, incense, the Eucharist, prayed words), they often are insufficient in their desire to love God as He actually is, veiled from our eyes by a “cloud of unknowing”. The unknown, unknowable God. He said that all the meditations on the crucifixion or the Virgin Mary or our sinful condition and so on, were worth less than this, to seek to love God as He actually is. Which is, to some extent, unknowable.
God is primarily known through His/Its intersection with our lives. Even when we leave this reality to go to the next one, this may still remain more or less true. And most of the time, we only understand God's intersection with our lives in retrospect, only rarely at the time it is happening.
Our situation relative to God is rather like that of a little flower and the Sun. A flower does not have any idea what the Sun is in itself. It does not know that it is far away in space. It does not know that the Sun has a diameter of about 1.3 million kilometers, or that it weighs 1.9891×1030
kilograms. The flower does not know that the light it receives is the product of nuclear fusion. The flower does not know any of these things.
And yet, every day the flower turns its face towards the Sun, and follows the Sun through the sky. It does not have to know the Sun, for the Sun to be the source and focus of its life. It knows the light, as it illuminates its own petals and leaves.
Following that light is a matter of the heart first, before the mind has anything to do with it. You love God, without exactly knowing what or who God is. Because you know the direction the light is coming from, like that flower. You turn to follow that distant light, not because you understand its Source, but because you understand what light is and what darkness is. How it manifests where you are. How it illuminates you.
