Really Knowing God

3 June 2025   John 17:1-1

“And this is eternal life, that they know You, the only True God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”  John 17:3​

What we are we doing when we say we “know”?

English has only one verb “to know,” but Latin has at least four, and each means something a little different, each a little deeper.

There is sentio, which gives us the English words “sense,” and “sensation.” It is the knowledge of the things we can perceive with our senses. We know God this way when we first start hearing prayers, and learn to say them – “Our Father, who art in heaven….” “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.” “Hail Mary, full of grace….” We know God this way when we learn our first songs about Him – “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” “O come let us adore Him.”  We learn to recognize pictures of shepherds and Wise Men and three crosses on a hill. We learn to recognize words like Jerusalem, Galilee, and Nazareth, the Red Sea and the Damascus Road. These words and songs, pictures and symbols become the furniture of our minds, the images in our mental living rooms and on our bedside tables.

Then there is scio, which gives us our English word “science.” It is the knowledge that urges us to know the facts about God. We learn that there is an Old Testament and a New Testament, Gospels and Epistles, Heaven and Hell. We learn there are Seven Sacraments, Ten Commandments, Three Persons of the Trinity, and Seven Deadly Sins. We commit the Nicene Creed, the Act of Contrition, and the Gloria to memory. We learn there is a Liturgy of the Hours, Holy Days of Obligation and seasons of the Liturgical Year. We mark time through the day, through the week and through the year with the marks of God. Sadly, most people don’t get beyond this kind of knowing.

But for some there is intellego, which gives us the English word “intelligent.” Its literal meaning in Latin means “to pick out,” and refers to what people do when they read – they are picking out what the words are referring to, and seeing the ideas they are leading them toward. It is the deeper knowledge, the kind that wants to know not just about God, but to know God. In pursuit of this knowledge people read the whole Bible and attend Bible Study groups. They develop attachments to devotions like Lectio Divina and the Rosary. They pray daily, and never miss Mass, and never miss an opportunity to tell you about the excellent book on the cosmological argument they have been reading. They have an answer to all of the spiritual and theological questions people ask, and many more that people ought to ask. Their formidable learning makes them experts about God. They always have an answer. They are the ones people always ask to pray.

But there is still a more excellent way.

The highest form of knowledge is cognosco. It is ironic because it is a kind of unknowing. It is a knowing that is scarcely aware of itself, almost never calls attention to itself, regards itself almost as a distraction from what is really important. The story of God has so formed the hours of the day, the days of the week and the weeks of the year, has so formed how to think and what to think, that all of life is a turning toward God and away from self, a turning toward God that perfects the self because the self abides, hidden in the inner life of God.

That’s the kind of knowing that Jesus says is eternal life. It is the kind of knowing we are scarcely aware of because our attention is entirely somewhere else, some better place.

C.S. Lewis once advised a close friend, “As long as you notice and have to count the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service [or the perfect prayer] would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.” (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, p. 4)