THROUGH UNTRUE

We have no precise Filipino words that correspond to "being," "presence," "existence," "subsistence," and other abstract or metaphysical concepts. We try our best to express these using our native words, but we succeed only in watering down their meaning. As the late poet Ophelia Dimalanta wrote: "All thoughts of what is held most dear are frailest, easily violated, and most readily elude poetry’s confining ministries."

Expressing abstract concepts in Filipino is not only a linguistic or semantic problem. It points to one common predicament arising from our tendency to refer a strange thing to what we already know, or put it in a group that is familiar to us. For instance, we understand "man" by classifying this creature as belonging to a group called human beings. Then we differentiate him from other human beings by labeling him as handsome, beautiful, obese, anorexic, etc. By describing human beings using such adjectives, we presume to know and understand them. In reality, we simply minimize their strangeness to make them more familiar and, therefore, less problematic.

The downside to this is, we ignore what is unique and individual about each item in the group of familiar things. Since adjectives are group words, they cannot adequately express the uniqueness of a person or thing. So it is wrong to presume that we have said everything there is to say about a man after putting him in a box. What we have done was to regard him as someone like “all the rest” in the group to which we think he belongs. The worst that we could do is to pin him down and demolish his mystery.

Unlike human knowledge that is partial and categorizing, God's knowledge is a total and penetrating grasp of the uniqueness of each individual. This is perhaps the meaning of the biblical passages that say God knows even the number of hair on our head (Luke 12:7), and that He has written our individual names in the palm of His hand (Isaiah 49:16). By His knowledge, God celebrates our freshness and unrepeatability.

The great novelist Graham Greene once said that his writing greatly improved when he did away with adjectives. By this he meant he could write better when he stopped his habit of categorizing or labeling, and developed a certain openness, a zone of interior silence where he could behold reality with wonder and reverence.

In today’s gospel reading, the people in the town where Jesus grew up reject Him because they think they know Him too well, so they have Him all figured out (Luke 4:21-30). They put Him in a box, refusing to acknowledge that He can be more than what they think of Him. When Jesus refuses to act according to their expectations, they are disappointed with Him, and even plan to kill Him.

When we think we know God too well, we tend to downsize Him and limit what He can do according to our expectations. God wants to be adored as God, not a deity whom we can downsize, so He becomes accessible when we need Him, but easily disposable in time of plenty. God is not someone who is at our beck and call, always willing to go the extra mile, always giving and forgiving, and never demanding anything in return. Over-familiarity with God bleeds Him dry of His sacredness and divinity.

Does God disappoint you because of the many unforeseen and unwanted events in your life? Welcome to the club! All true believers experience a God who confounds their expectations. This does not mean that He does not care about us. When things do not go according to our wishes, this actually gives us an opportunity to de-familiarize what we know about God, challenges us to humbly kneel and pray, and delve deeper into His unspeakable mystery. He is, after all, a God, not an idol.