Capax Dei
A good deal of people have resigned themselves to the belief that the presence of God cannot be detected, that even if He did exist there would be no way for us to know, no way for us to use our senses to experience His presence.
One the one hand, they have a point: God’s presence cannot be measured empirically. But on the other hand, they would be wrong to say that His presence cannot in any other way be known. While the detection of God does transcend the capacity of the five natural senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, there is yet a higher faculty with which we can indeed “sense” the presence of God.
The human soul is an immaterial reality within us, as is the mind. The human spirit (or the “heart”) is also a transcendent mystery within the human person. So while the physical senses of the body are incapable of sensing God’s presence directly, the soul and the spirit nevertheless remain capax Dei, capable of God. In the intellect this perception of God can happen. In the Christian tradition, we call this “prayer.”
“The lifting up of the mind and heart to God.” This is how the Church defines prayer. And this is what enables us to transcAend our five natural senses in order to detect the presence of God in our lives. Taking Atime to exercise our transcendent faculties, we “touch” God with our mind and heart. We “hear” Him.
So if a person has resigned himself to the belief that God cannot be detected, it is most likely because prayer is foreign territory to that man. And we are all that man in some way. We’re all tempted daily to deny the possibility of knowing God. We all need to be reminded every day of our capacity for Him. But that requires prayer, and prayer requires the discipline of our natural senses in order to engage our higher faculties of perception. This is why silence and stillness is so terrifying to us.
But, as Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him so no longer.” Now we know Him through prayer. It is the silence of prayer that brings us into contact with God. His voice is loudest when our lives are quietest.
I’ll share with you here that my own life changed drastically two weeks ago when one of my ears began ringing after I had been using a miter saw in the terrazzo hallway of the Family Center while working on the chapel we’re completing for the parish. After visiting with different doctors, it seems my ear will always be ringing. It hasn’t been easy to accept. In truth, there are times when it feels like the heaviest cross yet.
I mention it because it’s already taught me something. For example, when I am busying about and my ear is perceiving other sounds the ringing is subdued and easy to forget, like the voice of God. It’s when I am quietest, as when I sit in prayer, that the ringing is loudest. In the silence, I become immediately aware of the presence of something that I cannot control. Nor can doctors make it go away.
But if I accept it as a suffering permitted by God for some good, I can offer it in union with Christ’s own prayer on the cross. And so I’ve been working on that. I’ve been trying to offer the ringing as a sacrifice for all those who never make time to sit in silence and listen for God, for those who, in the busyness of life, are either forgetful or afraid of our human capacity for prayer. I offer it for the conversion of those who forsake our greatest human capacity, our most transcendent quality, namely our ability to sense the presence of God with the heart. +