What or who is God?

One who embarks on a spiritual journey is always evolving and becomes aware of two contrasting facts over time: not the finite is distant and yet near. First, he experiences more and more that God is a mystery. He is completely different, holy, invisible, incomprehensible, utterly transcendent, in all words, beyond the possibility of the of understanding. “A child just born,” writes the Roman Catholic writer Georg e Tyrrel, “knows as much about the world and its ways as about the most – wisest among us can know of the ways of God and of the …who rules over heaven and earth, time and eternity.”
A Christian living in the Orthodox tradition will be completely comfortable with this agree. As the Greek Fathers pointed out, “The God whom we can understand is not God.” For the God whom we would dare to comprehend in an exhaustive way through the use of our reason, will be nothing more but an idol, a thing of our imagination. Such a God is totally unlike the true and living God of the Bible. Man is made in the image of God, not in the image of God.
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And then it is also important that this God of mystery is still uniquely open to us, filling all thought and always present in us, around us and with us. We are not present only in the atmosphere or by his power, but personally. God, who is infinitely beyond our understanding, is with us. He calls each of us by name. Between us and the transcendent God is a relationship of love, similar to the relationship of each of us to those who of those dearest to us. We know other people only through our love for them and through their love for us. The latter is also with God. In the words of Nicholas of Kabbalah..: God, our King, is more loving than any friend, more just than any ruler, more loving than a father, more a part of ourselves than our own members, and more indispensable to us than our own hearts. These are, then, the two poles of the human experience of the divine. God is both more distant and closer to us than anything, and paradoxically we discover that these two poles are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more we are attracted to one, the more clearly we are aware of the other. As we follow this path, we discover that God is becoming more and more intimate, but also more distant, more familiar and more unfamiliar – familiar to a small child, not understood. God dwells in inaccessible light, and man stands in his presence with loving confidence and addresses him as a friend. God is both the end of things and their beginning . He is the open arms that welcome us at the end of the pilgrimage and the companion who walks to guide us every step of the way. As it Nicholas Kabasila describes, “God is the shelter in which we rest at night, and the final destination of our journey.” God is a mystery, and yet a person: look at these the facts.
God as mystery.
We shall make little progress on the road unless we make with a sense of awe and wonder, with respect for the mystery of God. When Samuel Palmer first visited William Blake, the old man asked him with what feelings he approached the work on his paintings. “With fear and with fear,” Palmer replied. “Why your work is good…,” Blake said.
The Greek Fathers liken the human encounter with God …to the experience of someone walking in the fog over a mountain. The rush and he suddenly notices that he is on the edge of a precipice, below him. …there is no solid ground, but only a bottomless pit. For they also use the example of a man standing in the night in a dark room. The moment he opens the window, he is suddenly …he is struck by lightning and staggers back, momentarily blinded. Such is the purpose of the encounter with the living mystery of God. We are overwhelmed with dizziness, and it seems to us that we cannot, we can’t grasp anything firmly. Our inner sight is blinded. and our normal faculties of perception are in ruins.
The Fathers also use both symbols of the spiritual path two Old Testament figures, Abraham and Moses. Abraham, living peacefully in his ancestral home in the Chaldean Ur, he hears God’s voice: “Get thee out of thy land, out of thy …and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” ( Gn 12:1) They obey God’s call, which delivers them from his native environment, and boldly go into the unknown, without a clear plan and destination. He is simply invited, “Go forth…,”..and in faith he submits. Moses has three successive visions of God: first, he sees God as a vision of light in a burning bush (Ex 3:2), then God appears to him by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in the pillar of fire that accompanies the people of Israel in the wilderness ( Ex. 13:21), and finally he meets God in a kind of “not vision,” when he speaks to God in an opaque cloud at meeting on Mount Sinai (Ex 20:21). Abraham wanders from his native home to an unknown, and so it is experienced by everyone who walks the spiritual path of his knowledge into the unknown, he advances into the darkness. It is not a simple stepping out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge, but we are moving from the light of partial knowledge to a greater knowledge that is so much deeper that it can be described only as “unknown darkness”. As Socrates and, we know how little we know. We see that the role of Christianity does not give easy answers to every question, but rather a step towards the realization of the mystery. God is not driven by of the many objects of knowledge, but the cause of wonder. If it is written in Psalm 8:1: “O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is your name in all the earth.” St. Gregory of Nyssa states, “The name of God is unknowable, it is wonderful.” If we acknowledge that God is incomparably greater than
Then anything we can think or say about him, we will discover , that it is necessary to speak of him not directly, but in figures and parables. Our theology is therefore, to a considerable extent, however, symbols alone are not enough. If we want to express the transcendence and total otherness of God. To express such a great mystery, we must use negative statements just as much as positive ones. In this way, it becomes clear that God is something else, more than what we are able to say about him. Beyond the use of this way of negation, which is called the apophatic approach (theology), our talk about God will be entirely misleading. Whatever we say about God – however correct it may be – does not reach the power of living truth. If we say that he is good or just, we must add that his goodness and righteousness cannot be measured by our human by our human standards. If we say that he exists, we must add necessarily add that there is no such thing as an object of limitation to others. In this case, the word “exists” means something very special. This is the way of positive statements, as Cardinal Newmann puts it: “We are always capable and yet incapable of goodness a satisfactory result.” If we are to affirm anything about God,…we must go beyond that claim, even though we ourselves are not false. Words cannot fully express God’s transcendence. However, the spiritual path is shown to be a path of transformation in all a very radical sense. Metanoia , the Greek word for repentance, expresses a complete change of mind. When we approach God, we change our minds, we undress ourselves of all our habits and habitual ways of thinking. …and our habitual ways of thinking. We are not turning around by our will or by our intellect, we need to change our inner perspective completely.
We need to put the pyramid at the top! The thick darkness we are entering with Moses is being illuminated with light. The apophatic journey and the “not knowing” of our leads not to emptiness but to fullness. Our negation is in the of reality as super-claims. The apophatic approach, destructive in its outward form, is positive in its resulting effect: it helps us, in addition to all negative and positive
statements, beyond language and thought, to relate to the immediate experience of the living God. This in itself really includes the word “mystery”. In the most proper in its most basic sense, it includes the “mystery” of concealment and revelation.
The Greek noun “mysterion” comes from the verbs and “myein”, whose meaning is to close the eyes or the mouth. Candidates initiated into certain pagan minds were first blindfolded and led through a maze. When their eyes were suddenly uncovered, they saw that everywhere around them were the mysterious signs of the cult. This is what they see in Christianity. In the Christian context, by mystery we do not mean that which is impossible and mysterious, enigmatic or unsolvable – a mystery is that which is revealed in order to be understood, even if we know that we will never fully understand. This mystery points to the darkness of God. The eyes are open, but at the same time but closed. If we then speak of God as a mystery, we know
…we know that He is hidden from us, but at the same time He wants to reveal Himself to us. He wants to reveal Himself to us as a person and as love.