On Reading Karl Rahner...

I was convinced that...I experienced God directly and I wish to communicate this experience to others, as well as I can.  If I thus claim to have had a direct experience of God...I mean only that I experienced God, the ineffable and unfathomable one, the silent yet near one, in his trinitarian bestowal upon me.  I experienced God also and especially beyond all images---who when he thus approaches in his grace cannot be confused in any way with anything else...I have experienced God himself, not human words about him...This experience is truly grace, but for that reason it is nonetheless essentially refused to no one.  Of that I am convinced...One thing remains certain:  God can and will deal directly with his creature....a person can experience God's very own self.

Harvey Egan's book, Karl Rahner, Mystic of Everyday Life,  quotes extensively from the writings of the man some consider the greatest theologian of the 20th century.  But Rahner's theology was not academic speculation; it was rather a search for ways of explaining what he himself experienced---the gift of God's offer of himself to every human person.  He contended that we consciously experience grace, that is, the working of the divinizing Spirit of God within us.

To someone who once told Rahner that he had never had an experience of God, Rahner replied:  I don't believe you....you have had, perhaps, no experience of God under this precise label "God," but you have had or have now an experience of God---and I am convinced that this is true of every person.  [Just because we do not know how to express or explain it] is no proof that we have not experienced God.

Reading Rahner's thoughts makes me wonder how people would say they have experienced God, or if they have experienced Him.  Maybe that is a book in the making......