Why smart people struggle to believe in God

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:20]The Feast of the Holy Trinity is either a real problem and a bit of an embarrassment to some people or else it's an amazing opportunity to go on a deep journey into God. Let's take it as an opportunity because in a society which prizes rationalism more than most other values, believing in God has never really come easily.

[00:00:42]But believing in the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity has been particularly difficult.

[00:00:46]This opportunity in the church's liturgical year allows us to remind ourselves as well as talk to the people we live amongst in a different register to see if we can make the shift away from the grip that rationality has on us and allow us to access the needs of the heart because the heart is seldom satisfied.

[00:01:09]Whenever we talk about the Holy Trinity, we can find ourselves reminding people that three into one doesn't go.

[00:01:16]And people do find it quite difficult to get beyond the reflex of thinking mathematically.

[00:01:21]Numbers come more easily to us than relationships do. Well, at least often to men that's the case.

[00:01:29]But part of the problem comes from living in the Christian West. The Christian East has a bit of a different way of looking at things.

[00:01:36]So, for example, in the Christian West, we might ask the question in our rationalistic culture, well, what's God like?

[00:01:44]What is God?

[00:01:46]In Eastern or the Orthodox Christian culture, the other lung, we might say, the question is usually framed rather differently.

[00:01:54]It has more to do with how can we experience God? How can we participate God?

[00:02:00]How can we know God with more than just our brain?

[00:02:03]Well, it's not in the West as though we've been completely shielded from that. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing, which was written between 1370 and 1390, wrote about this with some really deep insight when he said, "God may well be loved, but he cannot be thought.

[00:02:23]By love, he may be grasped and held, but by thought, never."

[00:02:29]You'd think that was a warning we might have taken notice of.

[00:02:34]The valiant, overconfident empirical atheists of our culture find it very difficult to imagine that anything which escapes the octopus-power like of our minds could ever have a reality greater than their own intelligence.

[00:02:47]But the author of The Cloud of Unknowing knew there was always a problem when you start thinking about God.

[00:02:53]It's not difficult to explain. After all, the moment we think about God, we've made him our creature. He, as a thought, has been made by our brain.

[00:03:03]He's been captured by the contours of our mind. In other words, the instant we think about God, he's no longer God.

[00:03:11]He becomes an idol.

[00:03:13]We should have been suspicious when we discovered that the way we love is very different from the way we solve mathematical or practical problems.

[00:03:22]How many times have we been told that God is love and not a mathematical puzzle or a problem?

[00:03:29]Love is always beyond the remit of our rationality.

[00:03:35]If we conceive of God's monotheism as being like the number one, then we make God an object more of power than of relationship.

[00:03:46]And actually, this would give us an excursus into Islam, which we're not going to take today. One is alone, one is isolated. But what if God and this is hard to conceive, it's true, but what if God was single and plural at the same time in some kind of quantum philosophy?

[00:04:06]What if God is not an object so much as a single unified relationship?

[00:04:12]We found ourselves talking about God as three in persons and one in being because of being three dimensions, you might say, although we need something more personal than the word dimension to our experience of the one God. We have [snorts] experienced God as creator and then discovered that the creator enters his own time and space as the Logos, as John tells us.

[00:04:37]And suddenly God was now relationally father and son, creator and Logos. And then we discovered there was some form of intentionally personal dynamic between them amounting to a third who was one in being but different in function, more than an energy, a real person.

[00:04:57]We discovered the Holy Spirit and suddenly we have one God united in essence but known in three dimensions but more than a dimension, three persons because we get our dimension, well, of course we're not, it's person. We get our personhood from the persons in the Trinity.

[00:05:17]This is difficult to explain to somebody who wants to capture God with their mind but much easier for someone who wants to experience or participate in the life of God made accessible through an encounter with God as father, God as son, companion, savior, God as Holy Spirit.

[00:05:38]On the feast of the Holy Trinity we ought to give some more thought to the way we encounter God, experience him rather than the way in which we try to Well, it ends up by trapping him, doesn't it? But at least explain him or imagine him with our rationality.

[00:05:53]Of course, we're not very good at managing without our rationality. It has such useful functions, but it also has profound limitations, especially when it comes to talking about God.

[00:06:06]There's a rather splendid Orthodox theologian called Con John Zizioulas who wrote very helpfully about the Holy Trinity using the phrase being as communion. I sat down and thought about that for quite some time. It's very dense and it takes a lot of unpacking. Again, thinking about it is the way we start.

[00:06:28]It tells us though about the limitations of our intellect.

[00:06:31]For analysis separates, but love unites.

[00:06:36]Concepts distinguish themselves one another, but communion joins together. Definitions create boundaries in order for us to distinguish.

[00:06:46]But the Holy Spirit is not limited or helped necessarily by our boundaries.

[00:06:52]The great deformation of Christian faith is talk about God as an it instead of a he or a person. It's not just slipping into a kind of Buddhism. It's also losing the essence of who God is in relationship to us. We are not its despite the plethora of personal pronouns that people choose.

[00:07:17]Talking of God as it reduces him back to the status of an object.

[00:07:24]But calling out to him as Father puts us back into a relationship.

[00:07:29]And suddenly we know or we experience or we reach out with our heart before our mind.

[00:07:37]Yet, once again, we cannot know God the Father without having got to know Jesus through the words of scripture, but then through the encounter with the way scripture talks to us, he becomes our friend and our brother as well as our savior. We get to know him and he introduces us to God not as an object but as his father and therefore our father.

[00:08:02]We forget we don't have a right to know God as father unless he comes as the father to our friend Jesus.

[00:08:10]We might say to our brother Jesus, the quality of love that flows between us is given to us by the Holy Spirit.

[00:08:19]This is what St. Paul is talking about when he talks about the spirit within us calling out Abba.

[00:08:27]Abba's daddy.

[00:08:28]Father, a language of the most the utmost intimacy.

[00:08:33]This isn't a concept, it's an experience burst by the Holy Spirit. To know the God that Jesus introduced us to is to find ourselves lying in the arms of Abba, who daddy who created us, brought there hand in hand by his true son, equal in being but different in person, and held in the you might say the electricity that knows us and loves us that we call the Holy Spirit.

[00:09:01]And this is all about participation rather than comprehension.

[00:09:07]What is it that the Christian East offers to the balance our more rational culture in the West?

[00:09:14]It reminds us we get to know God better by joining in, by doing, rather than by thinking.

[00:09:22]In fact, it could be that trying merely to think about God is one of the most unhelpful things we can do because it's one of the ways of relating to him that runs out of road the quickest.

[00:09:35]What would it mean to participate in God? Well, I think there are four, maybe five, I'll show you why it might be different, ways of participating in God that are particularly common throughout the Christian tradition.

[00:09:48]If we want to know God, we have to engage in them in some pattern or another.

[00:09:55]And the basic four, with one extra I want to add, are of course prayer, something we do, liturgy, something we do, ethics, something we do, beauty, something we do. We might add one more.

[00:10:10]I think we have to add one more. And I want to say that it's suffering.

[00:10:18]So, let's talk about prayer first of all. Isn't it interesting that when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, it wasn't because they heard him using formulas of spirituality.

[00:10:31]They saw him pray. They felt him pray.

[00:10:37]They were attracted to him pray. They were overwhelmed by him praying.

[00:10:43]It was something of an intense mystery of his relationship with the Father, and they wanted a piece of it. They wanted to be drawn into it. Lord, teach us to pray as you do. So, praying became a participation, a joining in of Jesus' relationship with the Father. This is exactly what the author of The Cloud of Unknowing was talking about when he reminded us that love is a language of participation, joining in, and not thought.

[00:11:14]One of the remarkable things about prayer is that it's as much something that is done to us as something we do. We usually think of us as doing prayer.

[00:11:26]But in fact, I think the initiative comes from the Holy Spirit. It comes from God. We step into prayer really. We might open the door or turn the key or twist the handle and take some kind of initiative, but having made a decision we step into it and we let it happen to us quite as much as creating it. I think that's why it's so difficult sometimes when we start to pray nothing happens.

[00:11:51]It's because we're expecting us to to do something as if we could create prayer, but actually praying is something that comes almost upon us or up from inside us or we find it coming from behind us. It's something happens to us when we invoke the presence of God and we stop and suspend our mind and our rationality for a moment.

[00:12:16]We certainly do something by beginning it, but it swiftly moves from doing into being, from starting into resting, from into bathing or swimming or sinking or immersing or breathing or singing or adoring.

[00:12:32]If we don't participate in God by praying, knowing God never happens.

[00:12:39]We don't know him. You have to pray to know him and I think it's no accident that people talk about losing their faith when they begin to stop praying.

[00:12:51]Liturgy is a second way.

[00:12:55]Protestants always often find this more difficult because worship has sometimes become for them almost a form well, to some extent of religious entertainment, but also something that that that they do or need to feel.

[00:13:10]But for Catholics and also for the Orthodox, even more than Catholics, liturgy is something we enter rather than something we just perform. We do perform it, but we enter it.

[00:13:22]The Book of the Apocalypse constantly reminds us that worship is taking place in Liturgy, if you like, is the weather, the the atmosphere, the breath of heaven. To do the liturgy is to dilute the boundary between heaven and earth.

[00:13:38]To thin out time and eternity so we can step from one to the other with the assistance of adoration, with this dart of longing that pierces our heart.

[00:13:51]Our earthly worship becomes a sharing in a reflection of a an echo of a participation in an eternal reality.

[00:14:00]It's because the angels and the archangels around heaven are calling holy, holy, holy that we too call Sanctus at the height of the liturgy.

[00:14:14]The mass is therefore not merely a reminder of Christ. It's like placing a plug into an electric socket so the electricity suddenly flows from beyond us into us.

[00:14:24]In the East, very sensibly, they also use their bodies more than we do in worship. Well, we genuflect and we make the sign of the cross, but in the Orthodox tradition one one does much more than that. One one makes the sign of the cross as one prostrates oneself or lowers oneself from the waist very profoundly. And the very act of bowing before God while making the cross becomes a way of participating, of kick-starting our whole being through an act of the body.

[00:14:56]This act of liturgical adoration has to travel a long way beyond the confinement of the mind to kick-start the heart. In a strange way, the body can help the heart find its way of connecting with the reality of God more effectively than the mind can, which is why we use bodily postures.

[00:15:17]What about ethics? Also is a way of participating in God.

[00:15:21]This is probably not the right word.

[00:15:24]It might be better to call this obedience lest we confuse it with just being moral.

[00:15:30]Secular ethics after all talk about rules that need to be obeyed. Christian ethics are about the kind of person I'm becoming.

[00:15:39]The choices we make are a part of the participation we have in God and change us.

[00:15:47]We become somebody different according to the accumulation of the priorities and choices we make. The moral life is not compliance with rules so much as an act of longing. It's transformation.

[00:16:06]And this is one of the reasons why Catholic spirituality talks so much about virtue because virtue is not the mastering of moral code.

[00:16:14]It's participation in the goodness of God.

[00:16:17]This kind of obedience requires courage and the capacity for sacrifice.

[00:16:24]Which may be why suffering is also an element of participation in the reality of God. But I want to talk about suffering last. Come to beauty first or come to it by beauty.

[00:16:38]Beauty.

[00:16:39]Participation through light or music.

[00:16:43]We need a category that has to do with our experience of transcendence of ecstasy of this incredible wordless longing that we have in us. Sehnsucht, as C.S. Lewis described it.

[00:16:58]We're being touched by something far beyond the capacity of the mind and deep within that part of the heart that wants to sing and dance and adore.

[00:17:10]When we suddenly come across beauty and we're trapped by it or thrown by it or or or made aghast by it.

[00:17:19]We can't beauty easily, but we can immediately fall in love with it and just be desperate to respond to it.

[00:17:29]Perhaps almost nothing stops us in our tracks and makes our heart reach out wordlessly in adoration, searching for God, knowing we've been found by him already as being rocked back on our heels by beauty whether we encounter it in music or sound or sight or movement or the soul of another human being.

[00:17:50]Beauty again is the same kind of participatory knowing rather knowing about.

[00:17:56]And this is what people mean when they talk about peak experiences to use the language of Abraham Maslow.

[00:18:04]Time and time again, those who want to explain they've been touched by something numinous reach for the language of awe and transcendence. They struggle to find words that allow them to express something beyond words but which has been captured which has captured their heart and made them want to worship and adore if only they knew how and whom.

[00:18:28]And I think we have to add suffering as a way of participating in God.

[00:18:34]Suffering as a participation in the Godhead may be one of the most difficult aspects to explain.

[00:18:41]Theologically we know we've received the gift of freedom and we find ourselves consequently making the wrong choices and so being caught up in the stranglehold of our own disorder and disobedience from which we need to be set free.

[00:18:57]To become free from our own disorder requires either a suffering that identifies the limitation of our lower self our ego or else a willingness to bear the pain of others as they struggle with their disorder of their own lives in the world around them. And because God is love, he enters into our suffering in order to accompany us and ultimately heal us.

[00:19:24]And if we're to walk with him and journey with him, we too must be ready to enter into the suffering of others in order to carry them to his heart for help and healing.

[00:19:35]And we too must be ready to enter into his heart where there is suffering of a permanent kind.

[00:19:46]A person who knows suffering almost always knows things too about forgiveness, about mercy, about hope, about dependence and faithfulness that are born from relationship more than they're born from theories or knowledge or facts. St. Paul often speaks of knowing Christ through participation in his sufferings.

[00:20:10]In Philippians 3:10, he writes, "For he about his longing that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, that I may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death."

[00:20:28]On the feast of the Holy Trinity, the emphasis that Jesus constantly places on unity with the Father begins to come to us in a different shape slightly if we come to him and approach it by means of the route we've taken.

[00:20:42]This is no longer union in distinction from our disordered isolation and separation, but rather the means of finding a language that provides sufficient cohesion for the different aspects of the Trinity to be as much one as they are distinct.

[00:21:00]If we look at Jesus and think of the Father separately, we have to be reminded that I and the Father are one.

[00:21:10]John 10:30, the Father's in me, I'm in the Father.

[00:21:15]John 10:38, whoever seen me has seen the Father.

[00:21:20]Luke 14:9, and then comes this great call to intimacy and union expressed in words that contain such profound mystery. John 17, that they may all be one, even as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they may also be one in us.

[00:21:41]We're invited to find ourselves by entirely losing ourselves in union with the Godhead.

[00:21:48]There's always a danger of slipping into a quasi-Buddhist annihilation of the self if we're not careful, and that would be a deep tragedy because entering into God makes us paradoxically even more ourselves than we were when we were separate from him.

[00:22:05]I'd like to turn to the language of English Catholic mysticism. We've looked already at the cloud of unknowing, but I want to go, as we think about oning, to Julian of Norwich.

[00:22:15]I'm very fond of her and the language she uses.

[00:22:21]She says, for example, praying ones the soul to God. It's so much more elegant than unifies or unites, which I think somehow is technical.

[00:22:36]But I love this oning.

[00:22:38]It's exactly what we're after. Prayer ones the soul to God. She describes knitting as an image of intimate union with God.

[00:22:47]She writes, this beloved soul was preciously knit to God in its making by a knot so subtle and mighty that it is oned to God.

[00:23:02]>> [snorts] >> And the implication of this, of course, is that in this oneing we are made endlessly holy.

[00:23:09]The language of the mystics takes us to places we can't quite understand with our mind.

[00:23:15]Here are two translations of one of her most beautiful insights. We need them both in order to understand what she's saying. One reads, "God showed me there may be no manner of between between God and soul."

[00:23:29]The alternative version says, "There shall be nothing between God and the soul.

[00:23:35]Matter, things, barrier, barriers all dissolve in the embrace of love within the Godhead." And then echoing John 17, Julian writes, "Greatly ought we to rejoice that God dwells in our soul, but more greatly ought we to rejoice that our soul dwells in God."

[00:23:56]There is this wonderful word perichoresis, which involves interpenetration while dancing, which which is used about the Holy Trinity, but also about us as well.

[00:24:11]Lest we think this is new some new discovery, it turns out this was God's plan from the very beginning. He's calling us back into something he's already prepared for us.

[00:24:21]Our soul is made to be God's dwelling place, and the dwelling place of God is our soul.

[00:24:30]Writes Julian in one of her most profound observations, "For the same virtue by which our substance is enclosed in God, in the same virtue we are enclosed in God."

[00:24:44]And this feast day we see more clearly than ever the pattern that perhaps Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite laid down for us when he reminded us that our spiritual journey towards God would always be seen as a continual cycle which deepens with every turn.

[00:25:04]A cycle of purification, illumination, and union.

[00:25:08]You could use different words.

[00:25:11]Of cleansing, of seeing, and of loving.

[00:25:16]Or of being forgiven, of being seen through, and being gathered into God himself. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is therefore not a puzzle to be solved, but an invitation to be accepted.

[00:25:30]God is not asking us to understand him as much as he is asking us to participate in him. And we do so through prayer, through liturgy, through obedience, through beauty, and even through suffering.

[00:25:44]For in the end, the deepest truth of the Trinity is not that God can be counted or understood exactly, but that God can be loved and known, and knows us.

[00:25:58]And astonishingly, he invites us to dwell in the eternal communion of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

[00:26:08]Loving God is a matter of knowing him not so much with our mind as with our whole being, beginning with our heart, but encompassing all of us. In the end, words will always fail.

[00:26:23]They can't help but fail.

[00:26:26]But there is an experience deep inside us that is constantly growing in relation to God.

[00:26:32]And in this experience, we come to know and to love, and to discover meaning and music and beauty and in a far deeper richness for all the things that make us stop and have us waiting on God in this life are found deeply, you might say neoplatonically, in God and in heaven himself.

[00:26:59]To God alone be the glory now and unto the ages of ages.

[00:27:03]Amen.