God is known through love not the intellect

I've recently been reading the medieval mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing, the central theme of which is this:

"Through love God is known, not through the intellect: '[God] may well be loved, but not thought. By love [God] may be gotten and holden; but by thought never'" (Chapter 6)

When I walked away from my faith in 1996, it was because I felt unable to know God. I experienced a cloud of unknowing when it came to God. The chasm that existed between my mind and God's reality was too much. As a result, I denied God's existence. How could a God exist who we could never know? Over the course of twenty years, I explored the question of how we know God. I limited myself to the rational and cognitive realm, attempting to go ever further into the recesses of my mind in order to try and bridge the faith-synapse. However, the more I sought the less certainty I found. I was left realising that one can never bridge any gap between mind and reality, that we are incapable of knowing anything with any certainty.

My journey back to faith began when I started to honestly accept the limits of knowledge. Most of us live within a certain naivete when it comes to the things we claim to know. We assume there is a viable connection between reality and our mind; that our mind is doing a good job receiving and processing sense-data such that we experience things correctly (thus acquiring knowledge). However, the fact is we have no way of proving this. We cannot step outside our thought-process to check if this is happening. Yet, on the other hand, we will not survive in a world where we doubt everything. So we have to tell ourselves a story that there are things that are certain and true, such as our mind's ability to know things, even though we can never prove this to be the case. For some, to admit we are not in possession of certainty is scary and opens the door to all manner of other things. For the atheist it opens the door to God; for the theist, it opens the door to unbelief.

In my hospice work, I visit many people with dementia who are losing the knowledge of who they are and the life they have lived. For the religious, they are also losing knowledge of the God they have professed to believe in and worship. How do we relate to those whose knowledge is being lost and whose words are running out? How do we talk about God with those who no longer have the logical and rational capacity to do this? Surely it is in the manner the author of The Cloud speaks; that "through love God is known."

Yesterday as I visited with a client I read this from Paul's letter to the Ephesians: "I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge" (Ephesians 3:17-19). I was struck by this notion that love surpasses knowledge but then realised this is my experience in hospice. Many times I find myself sitting with people, holding their hand, singing to them and gazing in love at this amazing person in front of me. I love them for who they are and the life they have lived and as I do I watch them being transformed. I watch their demeanor lift, I watch people smile more, I feel them grasp my hands ever-tightly. I watch people become utterly consumed by love. Knowledge is limited and soon passes away, but the fruit of God's love in our life remains with us and will endure forever.