god who sees me, The

ONE OF THE SCRIPTURAL TESTIMONIES concerning our encounter with God is that of "being seen," "being known" by him. This is different from hearing "Yahweh's voice shattering the cedars of Lebanon" (Ps 29:5), or experiencing his presence in his mighty deeds when "he split the Sea of Reeds in two" (Ps 137:13), or even from Elijah's sensing his presence in the "gentle whisper" (1 Kgs 19:12). Besides recognizing God's activity in history and in nature, Israel also experienced "being known by God," as expressed in Psalm 139: "Yahweh, you examine me and know me, you know when I sit, when I rise. You watch when I walk or lie down" (1-3). This "being known" can also be an object of faith, a way of sensing and experiencing God's presence: "I believe, God-whoever you are-that you see me and know me at this moment." This is one of my normal ways of praying and of relating to God, one which I would like to describe.

Attempts to Know God

We try various mental and imaginative ways to obtain some notion of God in order to relate to him. Throughout my personal prayer history, for example, I have attempted to arrive at a pure idea of God. At a certain point, however, I realized that all such ideas were very inadequate, very limited, and that nothing I could think about God was really God. We realize, by means of analogy, that there really are Three Persons in the Trinity, that our ideas about the Trinity convey true knowledge, that the Trinity is not a mere symbol for the God beyond God whom we cannot know, that God really is a Father, and that he really is Light. There is truth in all these ideas.

These ideas, though, are at the level of belief. They express what we believe about God-the quod, as the theologians say. However, everything that I can think of God is very limited. Only another person of the Trinity can fully know God.

One can try, then, to remain in some kind of nonthinking state-- like a Buddhist-constantly clearing the mind of everything, or in a "cloud of unknowing," hoping that the Holy Spirit will keep us in some kind of nonthinking, nonexperiential mode. Some of this is possible by our human efforts.

However, a particular grace of the Holy Spirit would be required to lift our minds to an effortless and constant, prayerful stance, to remain in the "cloud." We can wait for God to come and transform this state, maintained by human effort, into something more permanent. But using only our human efforts, this kind of prayer becomes rather tedious. Without a special grace from God, our feeble minds keep flitting back and forth between images and ideas. In his mercy, God gave me another kind of grace.

Being Seen by God: Old Testament Witness

What I was being led to was an act of trusting faith in the Presence who sees me, but whom I cannot comprehend with my mind. In other words, my faith was focused on the "Presence of the One who sees me." I don't know exactly when this awareness of "being seen" occurred, but I do know it was one of the graces I had been waiting for. It wasn't because I had read the story of Hagar (Gn 16:1-14) that I began to have this new prayer experience. Rather, after I read it, I recognized that hers was now my experience also, and that it had a solid scriptural foundation.

You remember the story. Sarai, frustrated by not being able to conceive, gives her maidservant, Hagar, to Abraham to conceive a child.

When Hagar does conceive, Sarai becomes jealous and sends the hapless Hagar off into the desert. The angel of the Lord meets her and asks where she has come from and where she is going. Hagar pours out her sad tale. The angel then gives her a promise about the future of the child.

It is Hagar's faith experience of God that I wish to emphasize here. How Hagar experienced her encounter with the angel (God) gave me an insight and a scriptural confirmation of how I was now praying. We will consider several translations of her encounter.

The new translation of Everett Fox from the original Hebrew: "Now she called the name of YHWH, the one who was speaking to her: You God of seeing! For she said: Have I actually gone on seeing here after his seeing me? Therefore the well was called: Well of the Living One Who-Sees-Me."

The New International Version: "She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: `You are the God who sees me,' for she said,'I have now seen the One who sees me.' That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi" [well of the Living One who sees me].

The New Jerusalem Bible: "Hagar gave a name to Yahweh who had spoken to her. `You are El Roi,' [God of Vision] by which she meant, `Did I not go on seeing here, after him who sees meT This is why the well is called the well of Lahai Roi" [Lahai roi may mean "the well of the Living One who sees me"].

Fox comments that Hagar's exclamation (which translators agree is a corrupt text) may mean that she "possibly is expressing surprise that she survived her encounter with God." Nevertheless, she expressed it by saying something like, "Is it possible I can still see ofter being seen by God?" There is a scriptural intuition: "No one can see God and live," also, "Can one be seen by God and live?" Hagar answers yes.

Psalm 139 can be seen as a scriptural commentary on Hagar's experience. God neither sees nor watches us-as from some high vantage point-walking down the street, nor is he observing us from outside ourselves. He sees us from within, totally penetrating every part of our being. A word better than "see," though still inadequate, is "know": "O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I stand" (NIV); again, "Yahweh, you examine me and know me, you know when I sit, when I rise" (NJB). Another translation of the word "know" in Psalm 139 is "amazing knowledge--amazing, not so much that God can know me, but that the extent and depth of his knowledge of me is beyond even my own comprehension of myself.

If I cannot comprehend myself, then how can I understand the God who is at the same time absolutely transcendent (meaning that He is not me) and totally immanent (meaning that He is more present, nearer to me than I am to myself)? How could we possibly comprehend such a reality? He knows every movement of my being as the One who is keeping every brain cell, every atom, in being: Truly, "you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain" (Ps 139:5-6).

Faith in the One Who Sees Me

For many years now my prayer has simply been an act of faith in the One who sees me. In other words, the object of faith (the quod) is not exactly a concept, an idea of God. If it is, that concept is simply that Someone knows me, sees me, and understands me without my trying to imagine who that Someone is.

At a certain stage in my prayer life, I stopped trying to "see" God with a concept, stopped striving for a state of mind free from all concepts. I became more aware that God sees me. I believe that this is a deeper faith-stance than trying to see God. Whatever you imagine or think about God, it is not God. If, however, your act of faith is directed to a Presence who sees you, this is absolutely certain knowledge because God does see you. You don't have to try and imagine who it is who sees you; you believe that Someone is seeing you. The act of faith is directed to the Seeing One. I keep saying, "Thank you, thank you, thank you" to the One who sees me.

Assuredly, I have a theology of who it is who sees me, a faith understanding of the Presence: the Trinity sees me. I don't think so much of the theological ideas, except in a fleeting manner. In prayer, it is the Seeing One who dominates my consciousness. My act of faith is simply directed to the One who knows me, and I can rest in this truth. There is no need to flit back and forth in the mind, seeking for exalted notions about God or trying to remain in a state of mindlessness. The mind has found a contemplative resting place where it can peacefully remain: God sees me and knows me.

Illuminated by this gaze, other insights into Psalm 139 reached a new depth. One is God's knowledge of my own thoughts: "You understand my thoughts from afar. A word is not yet on my tongue before you, Yahweh, know all about it." Not only before a word is on my tongue, but even before it enters my own consciousness-from afar-in that place in my deep heart and personality where thoughts originate. In that most secret of all places, God already knows my thoughts. Did not the Lord say that the Father knows what we need before we ask? He is the One who inspires us "both to will and to do." So he knows our depths even before we know of our own knowing, willing, and desiring.

This awareness of God's knowing my thoughts at that level of my being has profound implications for the simplicity of prayer. If I am aware that God knows the thoughts in the depth of my heart, there is no need to really express them in words or thoughts. It is not exactly a wordless prayer for I am still thinking thoughts in my heart. It is realizing that I don't actually need to put them into words since our Father knows the wordless prayer before I speak it-knows it "from afar."

Nevertheless, we must speak, for our sakes and not for God's. I find it helpful to say countless times, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," or, "I desire to serve you forever." The awareness that this is more for my sake than for God's keeps such verbal prayers to a minimum, knowing that God knows these thoughts before I do. It is a deeper kind of communication.

This realization of being seen is at the heart of Judeo-Christian mysticism. The Greek way is to travel through all the levels of intellectual knowledge and abstraction until you finally arrive at a "cloud of unknowing." The Judeo-Christian way is to believe that God knows how many hairs we have on our heads, holds us by the hand, and knows us as a father knows his children. The child does not know very much about the father except that he is there and will take care of him.

Deeper Implications

This experience of "being seen" also had deeper implications for my understanding of creation. We tend to think of creation as having happened a long time ago. Actually, God is creating at every moment. At every instant created realities are passing from nonbeing to being. In Chesterton's phrase, God is "immortally active." The days of creation are not over.

The verbs in the following lines of Psalm 139 are in the past tense, but I will put them in the present since this creative activity of God is going on at every moment:

For you create my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother's womb [in my present existence]; my frame is not hidden from you when I am being made in the secret place, when I am woven together in the depths of the earth. (13,15)

The marvelous wonder of my being is being knit together at every moment by the One who knows me.

St. Augustine took me one step further. Before I read the following comment in his On the Trinity, I used to think, "I exist, therefore God knows me." Augustine said, "He does not know all his creatures, both spiritual and corporeal, because they are, but they are because he knows them" (Book 15). It is because God knows me that I exist. If he didn't know me, I wouldn't exist. It is God's knowing and seeing that gives me my being.

Some integral components of my awareness of myself are (1) that I am; (2) that I do not know how it is that I came into existence or can continue in being; and (3) that I did not always exist. The One who sees me is responsible for all these dimensions of my existence. I exist, came into existence, and continue in being because of the One who sees me.

Augustine led me deeper still. In some way, God saw me from all eternity:

He was not ignorant of what he was going to create. He created because he knew. He did not know them differently when they were created than when they were to be created, for nothing has been added to his wisdom from them. It is written also in the Book of Ecclesiasticus: "All things were known to him before they were created, so also after they were perfected." (23:29)

That is, they are still known to him "now that they are finished" (Jerusalem Bible). Before I became conscious of my existence, I must have already had some kind of real existence because God knew me.

Ephesians says that we were known by God even before our coming to be in this present world: "Thus he chose us in Christ before the world was made" (1:4). If we were chosen, we were known. As Augustine said, "He did not know them differently when they were created." So the mystery of being known is an eternal one. Just as God knew me in my mother's womb before I became conscious of my own reality, so I was known in his divine knowing even before I was born into this present world.

This does not imply the pre-existence of souls, that is, at a certain moment I came into a state of being that I did not have before. I was, nonetheless, known by God from all eternity. If I have always been known, then I shall always be known since I cannot pass out of God's eternal knowledge. In some way, in the being and knowledge of God, I too am eternal since I always was and always will be known by him.

We Shall Know As We Are Known

When St. Paul was trying to express what the ultimate vision of God would be, he used this same experience of being known:

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. (1 Cor 13:12)

It is only a poor comparison, of course, but when Paul was trying to express how far-reaching our knowledge of God will be, he said it will be something like God's exhaustive knowledge of us. We shall know God to the full extent of our powers.

Thus, the awareness of being seen by God deepens other aspects of my awareness: I am kept in my very existence by God's seeing me; the One who sees me has always seen me and known me, and he always will know me. Unlike Hagar, we do not have to go out to a well in the desert to have an experience of being seen by God. Now, in Christ, the well is everywhere.

Robert Wild has been a priest of the Madonna House community in Combermere Ontario, Canada, since 1971. He has published a number of articles in religious jour nals, as well as writing about a dozen books on various spiritual topics. These include a trilogy on the spirituality of Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the foundress of Madonna House. He is presently stationed in England.

Copyright Spiritual Life Spring 2001
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