Connaitre of the Co-Natural

"What is God?" is the wrong question. The first 3 pages of Augustine's Confessions shows the trouble that kind of thinking gets one into.

Instead, "Who is God?" is a finer place to start.

God is The Father who gifts His full being to the Begotten Son. This is Charity.

God is The Son, who receives from the Father (from eternity!) His whole being. This is Hospitality.

God is the The Spirit, who is the eternal Love of Father for Son and Son for Father. This is Unity.

God knows me. God knows me not just with an encyclopedic knowledge, like I might know my times tables. God knows me like a people know one another. We are "familiar." We are of a family. The french verb "connaitre" gets closer to the way in which God knows me. Connaitre means familiarity or knowledge, but more literally means that God and I are co-natural. Being "connaitre'd" by God (and meagerly knowing God, as we are able) is to share in God's nature. Is to be made in God's image.

Because God and I are co-natural, my self-hood is intimately tied up in the self-hood of God. The God of Love Loving Love is intimately familiar with me and values me and LOVES me.

And though I have peculiar gifts and weaknesses and fanciful obsessions and meager patience and self-delusion and self-obsession and every other kind of messy, vulgar particularity...I know that I am co-natural with the God. There are many gifts, but one Spirit.

And at my best, I may rest transparently on the spirit which gave me rise. Gave me rise, I'll add to Kierkegaard, into a Creation of rampant Goodness. A goodness which includes me.

A goodness I have only because I am valued by the source of value and loved by the lover of love.

Godspeed.