Hello and welcome to another episode of One Heart, One Mind.

I'm your host Thomas McConkey.

Thanks so much for listening today. I want to explore something that, at least in my experience, growing up in the Christian

faith, we did not ever explore.

In fact, it was my experience as a contemplative, as a meditator in the Buddhist tradition that sensitized me to this

and got me curious about what, if anything, Christianity had to say about it.

And when I turned my gaze back towards the Christian faith after about 20 years absent, I was amazed. I was delighted to see that

the Christian tradition has a tremendous amount to say about this topic I would like to explore.

I call this episode the Unknowable God, and I'm going to unpack step by step what I mean by that.

And paradoxically, not to spoil the outcome here, spoiler alert, the unknowable God in my experience turns out to be a very

important aspect of the knowable God. It is the unknowability of God that lets us know God at deeper

and deeper levels. So I'm going to work with this pair of opposites, this polarity in this episode.

Let me start with some building blocks that I think will be helpful.

First of all, when we're talking about human life,

we could say that the prime directive of human life is for the body to get comfortable

and for the mind to get answers. When the body is uncomfortable, we want to get comfortable.

When the mind is confused and doesn't have clarity and certainty and finality on important

questions, it seeks out the answer to those questions.

So if we take this to be true, certainly at the level of what St. Paul called the natural

man, the natural human being with its appetites.

We can all relate, I imagine, to the desire to be comfortable in the body

and to know the answers to the most important questions.

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