Q&A With Fr. Sebastian Athappilly
Q: It is said that we must love God above all else. If someone were to say to you, “We can love a person, because we can see them. But we cannot physically see God, so how can we love Him?” how would you respond?
A: It is a fact that generally, we love someone whom we can feel or experience with our physical senses, someone we can see, etc.However, this does not mean that we cannot love a person who cannot be experienced through our sense of sight. I have, for instance, never seen Gandhiji. Yet I love and respect him. I have read some of his books and statements and have heard a lot about him. In the same way, I can hear about God and read His book. God’s book is,firstly,this created world. In addition to this, He has spoken to some selected persons (prophets, seers, saints). They have put their experiences in writing. When I respect His commandments and fulfil His precepts, I love Him. When I love His creatures, I love Him.In my Christian faith, I believe that God has made Himself visible, tangible, and audible through Jesus of Nazareth, whom Paul calls the [visible] “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15).
Q: It is said that we should grow in our knowledge of God. What do you regard as the ways or sources for this? How can this knowledge be experiential, rather than bookish?
A: Experiential knowledgeof God grows by means of prayer and meditation, reading the sacred scriptures, contemplating nature, selflessly serving human beings and other creatures, engaging oneself in what is right and for justice, living a life of love and forgiveness, communicating with those who have experienced God, and so on.
Q: Some people might argue that God cannot be known through our own efforts but we can understand ourselves. Hence, they might say, instead of believing in this or the other theory about God and praying to God, we should focus on understanding our self. In other words, they may stress what they call self-realisation, in place of God-realisation. They may say that in realising one’s true self one realises God.
What do you feel about this view?
A: Self-realisation is actually what God wants for each one of us. But this self-realisation has to be guided by the norms set by God, the One who has created us. He knows us better than we ourselves, for we are “designed” by Him. We cannot understand ourselves fully and adequately through our own effort. God-realisation leads us to self-realisation. Both are intrinsically united and grow in direct proportion.
Now, regarding another point that you raise here, praying to a God whom we cannot know would, of course, not be joyful. But the fact is that we pray to God whom we know and love, and who knows and loves us!
‘Know’ here does not mean to fully know. Whom do you know fully? We don’t know anyone fully, but still we can enter into relationship of love and dialogue with another person. So, too, with our relationship with God. We can never know God fully, but still we can have a loving relationship with Him. It is a matter of love, not knowledge. In one way we may say that in a loving relationship with God we know God (with our heart), rather than that we know about God (with our reason). Knowing a person and knowing about a person are two different things!
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