Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Mystery
Who is God? That was a question that Robert Wright asked Professor Fr. Lorenzo Albacete in an interview a couple of years ago. And the great theologian’s answer was simple: God is The Mystery! This is how St. Paul refers to God in the New Testament. The Mystery is not a riddle we try to solve. It is not a problem we have to find a solution to. The Mystery is like an ocean we move into – the more we get into the ocean the more the horizon gets further. We cannot comprehend God. We can experience God but we cannot fully put him in our little minds.
And when Wright pressed him about it, there was a more surprising asnswer:
Wright: Yes and I mean I gather one of the things you're up to is trying to talk about God in ways that make sense in a modern, intellectual... I mean, if you look at the Bible, there are some very anthropomorphic descriptions of God. There are descriptions of God sitting in a throne...Lorenzo Albacete: Yes.Wright: ...now, that's probably not the way you conceive of God...Lorenzo Albacete: No - no. Wright: ...but I guess one question I have is: how much can you modernize your description of God before it starts sounding too vague to have great emotional impact on people. I mean ... terms like "the transcendent" and "the infinite," they can mean a lot of things to a lot of people and I assume that you yourself as a believer have a somewhat more specific conception of God. Well, what is your... in other words you have a conception of God that is consistent with those terms, those are attributes of the God you think of but you think of something more when you think about God...Lorenzo Albacete: Yes. I think of a concrete human face...Wright: You do?Lorenzo Albacete: Jesus Christ.
Lorenzo Albacete was a physicist specializing in cosmology before he became a priest.
If you wish to see the full interview it is here:
http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=albacete&topic=complete
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Before I start to talk about the mystery of God let me ask the question, why do I need to know? Why do you need to know?
ReplyDeleteDo you need to know because you are looking for explanations? Do you want to know why? Why good things happen, why bad things happen?
I need to know what I have to do so all good things happen to me and the people around me and no bad things happen. I also want to know if bad things happen, how can I reverse them and return to be in the good part of life.
Let me start first by what I assume to be good and what is bad?
Do you think I, or anyone can define what is good and what is bad?
In my opinion this question eluded the human beings for generations. Why? Simply because you think you know the difference between good and bad at onetime, and you are following the good part but bad things happen. So you ask yourself, what is going on? To find out how bad things happen, you adjust your bad and good understanding. May be I did something that I thought to be good but in the eyes of "GOD" it was not, that is why something bad happened.
OK so who knows the answer?
Only "GOD" knows the answer. So then GOD knows all the answers. Then he has all the knowledge of good and bad. Does this sound familiar to you? Isn't this similar to the dialogue between Adam and Eve?
So God has all the answers, then God can be defined as the sum of all the knowledge. So in my pursuit of knowledge I got closer to Gods knowledge, if I know everything then where is GOD? right? wrong?
Another topic I would like to raise is talking about bad things?
I can only summarize the bad in one word because I think I found a single word that can describe bad. This word is "pain". As long as we have no pain we think we are on the good side. If we are in pain, then we are on the bad side. This pain could be physical, mental, emotional, etc… Why do we think this way? Does pain has anything to do with good and bad?, or is it a result of us being human beings?
Elias,I read your thoughts about what you call Good and bad. First of all you have to remember that God is kind ,full of love. knowing that,you know that God teaches us in the Gospel the Good and the bad not to do. Sometimes we think that what has happened to us( any bad thing to our eyes or humane understanding)is the result of our actions(which might be the case).But remember it also might be God's will . For example let's take the example of a person who divorced ( the person might say to herself " my husband left me because I was not the perfect wife, so she is blaming herself but in the same time the bad that happened (being divorced )for her or the society might be Good in the eyes of God and it is his will as the spouse was an obstacle for her to love God from the bottom of the heart. The bad that we see as humane beings is the Good in God's eyes. To know the good and the bad we have to constantly refer to the commandments and the scripture . If we read and learn we can know what God wants from us so not only God knows the Good and bad as you mentioned but we have to read and be knowledgeable to avoid errors.
ReplyDeleteSuffering for our actions is beneficial as not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
God Bless,
Nancy Morcos
Thanks to all who voiced their opinion.
ReplyDelete