Carlo Carretto, Italian Church leader of the Fifties who left all and joined a monastic order to live in the Saharan desert, says that the promise of Jesus speaks of his presence, an activity of his spirit and of a revelation. “I shall make myself known to you”. In his book “Letters from the Desert”, Carretto reasons that making themselves known to one another is the task of lovers; a task never finished, never complete. There always remains something mysterious to discover in the relationship, an element of the unknown.
He writes: “Think of God; in Him everything is to be discovered. But in the case of God one thing must be made very clear. God is unknowable to humans directly. We can know him only through figures, symbols and signs. But they themselves are not God. Only God knows himself and knowledge of him remains a mystery for us. But in his love, God has decided to make himself known to us, to reveal himself to us. And that happens in a supernatural manner, in a language untranslatable on earth. A person who grasps this realisation can say nothing. He cannot repeat it…..God is unknowable and only he can reveal himself to me through ways which are wholly his, unrepeatable in words and in concepts beyond our understanding”.
Angela of Foligno, one of the great Italian mystics, says: “Before God the soul…can say nothing because it has no words to express itself with. In fact, there is neither thought nor intelligence that can reach that far, so greatly does it surpass everything, the ways of God cannot be explained."
Carretto concludes that as it was for Angela of Foligno so it is for all of us. “We feel the knowledge of God becoming greater in us little by little, as our love for him becomes greater. And of this knowledge we are unable to say anything. We know that it is a rich, mysterious, dark, personal knowledge of him; but we are unable to utter a syllable about what we know, about how He manifests Himself to us individually."
