What disturbed Aquinas

Sufficiently understanding ‘what is God?’ might lead us to understand the question ‘who is God?’ It is the same question that led St. Thomas Aquinas reflect deeply on the essence of God. He grew spiritually dared to examine the mystery of God. Our (Dominican) contemplative tradition is a process that involves our mind, experiences, reading, contemporary events, that can lead us to a genuinely personal experience of God.

A ‘personal’ experience of God is neither an intellectual exercise nor an emotional fantasy. It is a search for the truth that becomes a prayerful dialogue. This dialogue engages the feelings as well as the intellect in order to avoid an impersonal exercise. True dialogue of prayer reflects on our virtue, fault, truth, or mystery, temptations, sickness, brokenness etc using the questions who, where, what, when, why, how, and with what help. Thus, the very search for the truth of God also enables our gaze onto the depths of ours.

Aquinas did not conceive God as a giant super-being who created the world through his skill and power, and using creation for his purposes. His world was not simply a gradation of being and seeing a super-perfection in God. Aquinas’ vision of the world has its origin, purpose, meaning, and goal within God himself. Creation can be embraced within the essence of God as creation participates in being, finds its beauty, truth, goodness in God. Creation reflects God and glorifies God. So, he followed ‘through creation to the creator’ as a sacramental approach to find God. What shapes us, and what forms us to be what we are, is ‘the Word.’ Creation, its processes, qualities, law, morality, theology, virtue etc, all must reflect ‘the Word.’ Christ is not just way, Christ is the exemplar for the humankind to become; he is the ‘head’ of humanity, the mind that guides history. All united to God in Christ.  So, the incarnate Lord is the unifying factor, grace of Christ is the bond within the great chain of being. His hymns and commentaries are examples for the tender love which he had for God, the incarnate Lord, the crucified, and the Eucharist.

Being, the nature of God, that any human heart longs to find and to be consoled is a deep embrace of God’s unfathomable love. It cannot be just for a single person, not just for humanity, but for the whole creation. God has brought us into existence, shared his truth with us, adorned with beauty, and found it very good and loved it. Can it be the experience Thomas had about the essence of God; a truth so simple, so familiar that we overlooked.

St Aquinas seemed to have asked often before the crucifix, “Lord, am I right in what I have written?” We too need to critically and sincerely re-reflect what we think of God.  We don’t have to be adamant with Thomism as another ‘ism’ to show love for St. Aquinas. Thomism has lot of rooms for newness and difference. Thomism is not a definition, final theory, it is a way, an exemplar. In our time we need to ask ourselves - Within our life experiences, and in the life of the church what really disturbs us calling out for the touch of the spirit? What are our ultimate concerns? Does the incarnation of Christ become a reality into these concerns of our life? How is the Word, the Christ forming our visions, values, attitudes for our time? How do our longings, struggles, questions, pains, temptations, falls, and even death becomes an openness to the truth of God?