All the question that seek a definition of something are open ended, highly disputable and can never be resolved. If ever we come to agree about the right definition, sooner or later, it will be challenged; and maybe we will not be there to hold it and defend it!

One such questions is: Who is God? I was brought up in a western culture, founded on the great Aristotelian, Platonic and later Descartian principles of thought. Our western mind goes by defining things. Later in life, well after my formation, I discovered that there is another way of looking at things and reality, namely apophatic. It is also called the negative way because instead of seeking to define things and say what they are, it goes by elimination, by discovering what that thing is not. So, not “Who is God?”, but “What God is not”.

I do not want to be naive and say: “Who cares?!”, or that all those who wonder and discuss to answer such questions are wasting their time, but what changed my life was the experience of God. This I think, I have the courage to say: What use would a life spent in research and hot discussions about who, and what not, is God, for someone who would have never sought to make a personal experience of God?

Many Jewish Rabbis were like that. They managed to decipher 613 precepts, or laws, in the 10 Commandments! But how many of them were holy rabbis, real men of God, who got the spirit of the Law? Christianity is not that much better. God knows the number of theologians in two thousand years of history. Of course, the Church is well blessed by a good number of holy theologians. Consider some of them: the great Fathers of the Church, who used to say that theology is made on one’s own knees! St Augustine, who later in life exclaimed: “O Love! So unloved! How late have I recognized You!” St Thomas Aquinas, who went to burn his great work, the Summa Theologica, after having had a mystical experience of God in the Eucharist! And what about some of the great Doctors of the Church, like St Catherine of Siena, who was even illiterate!

Funny! The wise man of the Law, in the Gospel of Luke, with all arrogance, tried to get Jesus involved in our curiosities and wasted debates. He put Jesus one of such questions: “Who is my neighbor?” Yet Jesus too did put to him another question: “Who behaved as a neighbor to the unfortunate man?”

The neighbor is not someone and not the other. The neighbor is a way of behaving. The neighbor does not depend on someone else, but depends on you! If the neighbor is someone that comes your way and stands next to you, than you might be excused of doing anything for anybody. There will always be some excuse. But if you seek to behave as a neighbor, than you will always go out of your way to be near someone who really needs you! But this will be another argument for debate, until one experience God who has decided to be our neighbor and came amongst us to be ever near us, especially when we need Him most!