Father Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam.

I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

Mt 11:25-27

This is one of the most beautiful and poetic passages in the Gospel of Matthew. I was reflecting on what ties the two sentences of this passage together. What does “because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants” have to do with ...“no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him”? I suppose it has to do with what being an infant or a child means in this context. One would be tempted to think that it’s just simplicity and trust, and perhaps that’s so. But because of the second sentence, when Jesus refers to his own relationship with the Father, I think it’s more.

Abhishiktananda liked to distinguish between “notions” and “experience.” He taught that Jesus experienced such a closeness to God that he completely exploded any previous biblical notion of “father” and of “Son of God”. For Jesus, this closeness extended so far as to calling God Abba, a name in Aramaic that can only be said by one “born from.” Father can be a metaphor (even an inspired metaphor, as Avery Dulles said), a notion. God is “like a father” or “like a mother.” But Abba is somehow an experience.

Jesus felt that the LORD God of Israel was his true Abba, and that he himself was “of one substance”––where we get the homoousios of Nicene Creed––of the same nature or “one in being” or as the new translation will awkwardly say “consubstantial” with the Father. Abhishiktananda even suggested that to call God Abba, as Jesus does, is an equivalent in Semitic terms of advatia, non-duality, that fundamental spiritual experience of India.

And of course it follows that just as Jesus identifies with the I AM of God, so we, through Baptism, identify with the I AM of Jesus: we are branches on the vine of the great I AM. So, that I AM of God is also the name of every conscious being.¹ “No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” What Jesus reveals is God’s I AM at the heart of our being, the “love of God poured into our hearts,” as Paul says. This is no notional, theoretical knowledge––i.e. the knowledge of scholars and the learned. It’s experiential knowledge, the knowledge of children and offspring. “The Father and I are one.” “All notions are burnt in the fire of this experience,” Abhishiktananda wrote.²

Since this is the gospel read on the feast day of Saint Romuald it also has a connection with another scripture text that is recommended for the feast of Saint Romuald, Psalm 131: “I hold myself in quiet and peace, like a little child in its mother’s arms.” Perhaps that was chosen because Romuald says in his Brief Rule that the monk should be like “the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother gives him.” I kind of like thinking of God as a mother hen, but more importantly, this is that knowledge again, not a notion, not knowledge that comes out of books and lectures, but the knowledge that a child has learned at the mother’s breast. Not the knowledge of the wise and the intelligent, but the knowledge of infants. Not just simple and trusting, but of one substance, one in being with, because of having come forth from the “womb” or the “loins” of the parental God.

I was thinking too of Chapter 20 of the Tao te Ching: “Others are brilliant and others are clear, while I alone still grope in the dark. The insights of scholars escape me––I am nourished by the Great Mother.”

If I may skip to yet another scripture reference (Isaiah 66), let’s pray that today at this feast of the Word and at the Table we may drink deeply with delight at the abundant breast of God’s consolation. That we may be nursed and carried in God’s arms. As a mother comforts a child so shall our God comfort us. This is the experience that burns up all of our notions of God, the experience of children of God, heirs of God, branches on the vine, all those to whom the Son wishes to reveal the I AM of the Father.

¹ All the above from Ascent, 376-377

² Ascent, April 1972, 347