I've been carrying that question since I was a little girl.
In kindergarten, a few of my classmates who didn't grow up with the faith asked me something I still remember:
"How do you know God exists? He doesn't speak, and you can't see Him."
When I pushed back and said that God does speak, they scoffed.
"You're crazy. You're hearing voices. God doesn't talk."
I didn't have a good answer then. I didn't know how to prove to them that God existed. I didn't know how to convey God's voice or God's truth. And, perhaps more painfully, I didn't know how to prove myself to them—that I was someone worthy of being believed, that my interior life could not simply be dismissed because someone else did not understand it.
That problem followed me far beyond kindergarten.
How do we communicate what we believe, why we believe it, and why we have lived the lives we have lived to people who doubt our judgment, our accuracy, or even our sanity? How do we persuade another person that what we perceive is true?
And what happens when, somewhere along the way, we have to confront an even more frightening possibility:
What if what I call "my truth" isn't the truth at all?
"You don't know me."
"I know enough."
But do you?
And, conversely, do I really know you?
If our understanding of reality depends entirely upon the ego—upon our perceptions, wounds, desires, fears, memories, and judgments—then how do we distinguish truth from the world we have constructed around ourselves?
Perhaps this is where the search for God begins.
Does God Speak?
My classmates' objection rested upon experience: I have never heard God, therefore God must not speak.
But whether God exists, and whether He speaks, cannot be settled merely by what any one of us has or hasn't experienced.
Neither can the opposite claim.
Experiencing something intensely does not automatically make our interpretation of it true. Christianity does not ask us to abandon reason in order to encounter God. It asks us to bring our experiences into conversation with reason, revelation, Scripture, tradition, conscience, and discernment.
The question, then, is not simply, Have I heard God?
It is also: How would I recognize Him?
Our culture often approaches claims of divine communication with suspicion. Someone who says, "God spoke to me," may be understood very differently depending upon what they mean by those words.
And perhaps some caution is justified. Human beings can misunderstand themselves. We can mistake desire for revelation, fear for prophecy, coincidence for command.
But the possibility of error does not prove the impossibility of encounter.
Christianity makes the astonishing claim that God is not silent.
He reveals Himself.
And ultimately, Christians believe He does not merely send information about Himself. He enters history Himself in the person of Jesus Christ.
Let's Begin With Us
Instead of beginning with an argument about God, however, I want to begin somewhere closer to home: with us.
I've come to believe that one way we begin to understand who God is is by looking inward—not because God is merely something inside our heads, and certainly not because every interior voice is God's voice, but because the human heart is one of the places in which we encounter Him.
St. Paul writes:
"For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known."
1 Corinthians 13:12
We see dimly.
I love that image because it leaves room for both faith and humility.
Our understanding of God is partial. Our understanding of ourselves is partial. Our understanding of other people is partial. We spend enormous portions of our lives trying to see clearly through a mirror clouded by pride, fear, desire, memory, suffering, and sin.
But Paul's sentence ends somewhere extraordinary:
I have been fully known.
Before I understand God completely, God already understands me.
Before I find the right words for Him, He knows mine.
Before I understand myself, I am known.
A relationship with God therefore begins not simply with our search for Him, but with the realization that He has already seen us completely.
Strangers at First
A thought from Frank Sheed's Theology and Sanity has stayed with me: intimacy with God cannot simply be borrowed from somebody else's intimacy. We must grow into it ourselves.
That is exactly how faith has felt to me.
There were times when God felt almost like a stranger.
I knew about Him before I knew Him.
I knew prayers. I knew doctrines. I knew stories. I knew that other people seemed to possess a closeness to God that I wanted but could not manufacture for myself.
And perhaps that distinction matters.
You can know hundreds of facts about another person without loving them.
You can read someone's biography without becoming their friend.
Theology matters enormously because we need to know who the God we are seeking actually is. But theology is meant to lead us toward contemplation and love, not merely information.
As St. Thomas Aquinas understood so profoundly, knowing God is not merely an intellectual exercise. Theology ultimately points beyond itself toward God.
We cannot borrow another person's intimacy with Him.
We have to grow into our own.
Prayer Is the Conversation
That is where prayer enters.
Prayer is not merely asking God for things.
It is relationship.
Sometimes it is speaking. Sometimes it is listening. Sometimes it is gratitude. Sometimes repentance. Sometimes anger. Sometimes Scripture. Sometimes it is sitting before God with absolutely nothing eloquent to say.
And sometimes it feels like silence.
Yet silence does not necessarily mean absence.
Human relationships teach us something about this. The deepest friendships eventually reach a point at which two people do not need to fill every second with words. Presence itself becomes meaningful.
Perhaps prayer can become something similar.
At first we may speak constantly because we are desperate for reassurance that somebody is listening.
Eventually, prayer can become:
I am here.
And faith answers:
You are not here alone.
How Do We Know It Is God?
But there is still a difficult question.
If we experience something internally, how do we know it comes from God rather than from ourselves?
This is where humility becomes indispensable.
A relationship with God is not the declaration that every thought I have is divine.
In fact, the closer we grow to God, the less interested we should become in proving ourselves infallible.
If God is Truth, then loving God means loving truth more than loving our own interpretation of things.
That means being willing to say:
I might be wrong.
It means testing what we perceive against Scripture, reason, the teaching of the Church, the fruits it produces, and wise counsel. Does what I believe God is saying lead toward truth, charity, humility, courage, repentance, and love? Or does it make me more prideful, fearful, obsessive, cruel, or convinced that I alone possess the truth?
Discernment is not a failure of faith.
Discernment is part of faith.
Perhaps one of the most dangerous spiritual temptations is not doubting that God speaks, but becoming so certain that our own voice is God's that we can no longer distinguish between the two.
Knowing God and Knowing One Another
Human relationships complicate this further.
Why do I immediately like one person and distrust another?
Why do I feel understood by one person and completely misread by someone else?
How much of what I see in another person is actually them, and how much is my own history reflected back at me?
We are not going to go through life letting everyone in. We will not like everyone we meet. Some friendships will last decades; others will collapse. Some people will misunderstand us. We will misunderstand others.
There are people we desperately want relationships with.
There are people we need to let go.
And there are people who will someday become important to us whom we have not even met yet.
Human relationships exist under conditions of limitation.
We do not know one another completely.
We love imperfectly.
We judge badly.
We wound and are wounded.
We change.
God does not.
And that is the great difference.
The One Who Does Not Change
The security of a relationship with God does not come from my ability to perceive Him perfectly.
It comes from who God is.
God is not perfect because I experience Him as perfect. God does not become faithful because I feel His faithfulness. His existence does not depend upon my certainty.
God simply is.
This is one of the great insights of classical Christian theology. God is not merely another being alongside all the other beings in the universe, only bigger and stronger. For Aquinas, God is ipsum esse subsistens—subsistent Being itself, the source from whom everything that exists receives its existence.
That changes what it means to have a "relationship with God."
God is not simply another person competing for space among all my other relationships.
Every person I have ever loved exists because God first gives them existence.
Every beautiful thing I have ever encountered participates, however imperfectly, in the goodness whose source is God.
Every true thing points toward Truth.
Every genuine act of love points toward Love.
And yet God exceeds all of them.
A Relationship That Keeps Deepening
Because God is infinite, we can never reach the point where there is nothing more of Him to know.
But this does not mean that our relationship with Him is already perfect.
God's knowledge of us is perfect.
His love is perfect.
Ours is not.
Our side of the relationship remains marked by distraction, misunderstanding, selfishness, fear, sin, and limitation.
And perhaps this is precisely why the relationship can keep growing.
There is always more to surrender.
More to understand.
More to love.
More to become.
We spend our lives trying to understand other people, trying to understand ourselves, trying to determine which voices deserve our trust and which judgments deserve to be questioned.
In the middle of all those approximations stands something—or rather, Someone—unchanging.
When I was a little girl, I thought I needed to prove that God spoke.
Maybe growing in faith has taught me a different question.
Not simply:
Can I prove that God is speaking to me?
But:
Am I becoming the kind of person capable of hearing Him rightly?
Am I becoming more truthful?
More humble?
More loving?
More willing to be corrected?
More capable of seeing another human being as God sees them rather than merely as I perceive them?
Maybe this is what a relationship with God begins to do.
It doesn't merely convince us that God exists.
It slowly changes the person who is doing the seeing.
And when everything else seems uncertain—when people misunderstand us, when relationships fracture, when our own perceptions fail us—we return to the One whose reality does not depend upon ours:
"The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer;
Psalm 18:2
my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold."
Perhaps being in a relationship with God means spending a lifetime learning to know the One who has known us completely from the beginning.
