I came across a poem entitled “To the Unknown God.” This heading conveys two things. One, that there is a God. Second, that our full knowledge of God reaches beyond human capacities, outdistances anything we, on our own, could ever understand or say about God.

Phrases like “incomprehensible Mystery,” “fathomless depth,” and “beyond the beyond” acknowledge this inability to understand God’s entirety, as well as our fruitless struggle to sound His depths.  This is the situation of the agnostic, believing but not knowing.

With such mysteriousness as background, we come to this assertion in John’s 3rd chapter. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that we might not perish but have eternal life.” This is a direct response to that situation of ignorance. Left to our own lights, we could never begin to lay hold of the Divine. But this gospel assertion goes beyond: God is Love. This love represents the profound connection between the Father and the Son. This divine affection is coming to us in and through this Son, Jesus Christ. His arrival shatters this shell of ignorance. Through Jesus, we have that fuller understanding of God.

We’ve heard this claim, God is love, spoken so often that it tempts us to take it for granted. But it’s a claim that goes to the heart of this issue, the unknown God. Here God is unveiling the Divine Being as love itself – and this not only in giving us His Son, but more so in sending this Beloved One to live out how this love takes flesh on the human stage. Jesus, in all the particulars of his life, death and new life, is God’s ongoing response to this question: what can we know about the unknown God? How is it that we can live lives guided by reliable knowledge of who the deity really is and what God asks of us.

In one of his writings, Louise de Marillac touches on this issue of our knowing God:

This practice of charity is so powerful that it gives us the Knowledge of God, not as he is in Himself, but we penetrate so deeply into the mystery of God and His greatness that we may say that the greater our charity the greater our participation in this divine light which will inflame us with the fire of Holy Love for all eternity

(Louise de Marillac, Spiritual writings | A.29, Page#: 711)