Giving Everyone God's Address

following in my teachers' steps

The real love
I always keep secret

All my words
Are sung outside her window,

For when she lets me in
I take a thousand oaths of silence.

But
Then she says,

O, then God says,
“What the hell, Hafiz,
Why not give the whole world
My 
Address.”

— Hafiz

Hafiz chose to reveal the intricacies of his relationship with God through the astonishing depth and playfulness of his poems. Meister Eckhart chose to do it through his sermons on the grunt [ground] of God that is also us, and is beyond all of our ideas about God. Teilhard de Chardin did it through his writings on the Noosphere.

How am I to do it, if I can? Through poetry, maybe, if I can. Through essays, if I can. Through my novels and other books, if I can.

Of course, maybe I can't. Maybe it's beyond me to put words to the Great Mystery so many of us call God. Or maybe … maybe my ramblings can help bring that Mystery down to Earth a bit. I mean, when O’Donohue goes on at such length about the energy and presence emanating from various colors, how many see that he's actually talking about God? 

I didn't at first. I thought, why is this man going on and on about the emotion wrapped up in the color orange? Did he really learn German and get a PhD in Philosophical Theology just so he could talk about the color blue? 

But now I get it. God is light. Colors are what happens when that light is broken open. So when O'Donohue says that blue is the color of wintering and stillness, he's actually telling us something about the unfathomable nature of God. He does not say this, though. He hopes, I suppose, for us to catch on, if we can.

Now, of course, I see he didn't finish the work, for he focused only on the visible spectrum. But what of all the other frequencies of light? What does infrared or ultraviolet have to teach us about God? What of x-rays and radio waves, and what of gamma rays, the most intense of them all? What do these have to say of the nature of the “God beyond God,” as Eckhart names him?

So, maybe, I can write about that.

And what of perception itself—how our senses have been honed for thousands of years not to understand reality, but to survive it? Why do we not see radio waves? The basic answer is because we do not need to. It isn't required for our survival. And yet, to know God, to find God’s address, we must understand all we can about radio waves—light that goes right through solid walls, and turns to sound when listened to in just the right way.

We are like children fumbling in the dark, our senses poor instruments for comprehending even the most fundamental facts about where we are—never mind who we are or where we're going. What can these facts teach us about the God who is beyond the names we give him?

Perhaps I can do both forms of inquiry — the mind and heart. Perhaps I can sometimes even make it sensible to the traditional mind. Perhaps this is the work to which I too am called.

I remember when I listened to O'Donohue going on about colors, I thought, This is obvious. Surely everybody already knows this! But now I realize: most people don't know. And O'Donohue, in his own sneaky way, was giving everyone God’s address.

Well, the secret’s out now. In my own fumbling way, I am trying to do the same.