For philosophers, existence is experiencing being. For the prophets, existence is experiencing concern. It is living in the perpetual awareness of being perceived, apprehended, noted by God, of being an object of the divine Subject. The primary content of a prophet�s consciousness is the divine attentiveness and concern. It is a divine attentiveness to humanity, an involvement in history, a divine vision of the world in which the prophet shares and which he tries to convey. It is God�s concern for man that is at the root of the prophet�s work to save the people. All things reveal the extreme pertinence of man to God, His world-directedness. God looks at the world and is affected by what happens in it. Man is the supreme object of God�s care - and of His judgment:

O LORD, Thou hast searched me and known me!
Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up;
Thou discernest my thoughts from afar.
Thou searchest out my path and my lying down,
And art acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O LORD, Thou knowest it altogether.
Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest Thy hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.
Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?
If I ascend to heaven, Thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, Thou art there!
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there Thy hand shall lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, �Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night,�
Even the darkness is not dark to Thee, the night is bright as the day;
For darkness is as light with Thee.
For Thou didst form my inward parts,
Thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise Thee, for Thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are Thy works!
Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from Thee,
When I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.
Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in Thy book were written,
Every one of them, the days that were formed for me,
When as yet there was none of them.
How precious to me are Thy thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
When I awake, I am still with Thee. (Psalm 139:1-18).

The ultimate category of prophetic theology, above which no genus contains it, is the theme and claim of God Himself: His personal involvement, attentiveness, concern. Prophetic religion is defined, not by what man does with his ultimate concern, but rather what man does with God�s ultimate concern. The fundamental and overriding truth taught by the Bible is not God�s act of creation, but God�s loving care for it. Prophetic experience is the realization of having been experienced by God.

All men care for the world. The sense of wonder for His creation is common to all men. But the prerequisite for being a prophet is having the sense of care for God�s care for His creation. The prophet cares for God�s care. Sympathy opens man to the living God. Unless we share His concern, we know nothing about the living God.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the reasons we refer to a thing as a sacrament is because it has a certain hidden sanctity: �Augustine says (De Civitate, X): The visible sacrifice is the sacrament, i. e., the sacred sign of the invisible sacrifice . . . Consequently, a thing may be called a sacrament, either from having a certain hidden sanctity, and in this sense a sacrament is a sacred secret; or from having some relationship to this sanctity, which relationship may be that of a cause, or of a sign or of any other relation. But now we are speaking of sacraments in a special sense, as implying the habitude of sign: and in this way a sacrament is a kind of a sign.� (Summa Theologi�, (IIIa, 60, 1, sed contra; resp.). All things in nature contain a sacred secret which refers them back to their intimate relationship with their Creator. Creation is nothing more nor less than a transposition of the creative mind of God. To transvaluate nature is to be transported back to the mind and heart of the Creator. Everything in nature bears the signature of God. Nature, therefore, is not a wall but a window, not an object but a metaphor, not a sign but a sacrament.

Overwhelmingly, mysteriously different from man, God is not the object of man�s imagination. He cannot be captured in a myth or comprehended in a concept or a symbol. Challenging, involved, and concerned, His presence pierces the impregnable walls of His own otherness. The dilemma is overcome by abstaining from any claim to comprehend God�s essence, His inmost being, or even to apprehend His inscrutable thoughts, unrelated to history, and by insisting upon the ability to understand His presence, manifestation, and existence as expressed: the prophets experience the Word He speaks, not the Essence of what He is.

The distinction between being and word is rooted in the distinction between essence and relationship. Being is what a thing is in its own act of existing. Communication relates persons, a sender and a receiver of a word. The theme of prophetic understanding is not the mystery of God�s essence, but the mystery of His relationship to man. The prophet does not speculate about God in Himself. What the prophet knows is God�s relationship to man. Of God we know only what He means and does in relationship to man. Man is in time, in history. So the prophet reflects, not on heavenly or hallowed mysteries, but on the perplexities and ambiguities of history, of existence in time. The prophet does not disclose the life of the world to come, but always speaks of an appearance, of God as turned toward man. The prophet refers to God, not as absolute, but always as related to people. It is an interpretation not of divine Being, but of the divine Interaction with mankind. The ground of the relationship is moral. The goal of the relationship is man.

God is encountered not as universal, general, pure Being. He is always in a particular mode of related being, personal God to personal man. He is always in a specific relationship that comes with a demand in a concrete situation. Prophetic theology is not focused upon His absoluteness but upon His subjective mode of being: His relationship to man and His self-expression. So, those who dichotomize God�s transcendence and immanence do so spuriously, for God remains related to man even in His transcendence of him. Philosophers and scientists reason by proceeding from givens, from data. The datum of the prophetic experience is not something given, but Someone Giving.

Every apprehension of God is an act of being apprehended by God. Every vision of God is a divine vision of man. One thinks of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Or of Pope John Paul II. Or the Transfiguration scene in the Gospels. The lack of glory we see on the Cross subsists solely in our lack of vision. And so, little wonder that some see no glory whatever in the ordinary appearance of a morsel of bread, itself Glory Himself. Even smaller wonder that others see no glory upon the face of the least of Jesus� brothers: the homeless person at the door seeking to keep body and soul together just one more day by begging from us the gift of food that God meant us all to share as our common heritage upon the land (Deuteronomy 24:21-22); the elderly sick and infirm, abandoned by their families to the hospital wards and �nursing� homes where we confine them so we don�t have to look at them or speak with them; the derelict in the county jail, awaiting a hearing on society�s charge of �public intoxication�, safely out of sight of the same society that through its coldness and lovelessness damned his mind and spirit to unlovely loneliness years before the police with rough treatment hauled him in to get him out of the way of the decent and beautiful people, who have created a place in their own image and likeness, leaving the heart of the city utterly heartless. Indeed does God come to dwell with His own, as those who prophesied the Messianic times foretold.

Yet, it is also true to say that it is human nature itself that is transfigured. There is no division of divine Christ and human Jesus. Jesus Christ shows forth the transfiguration of the creaturely nature He first formed in His own image and likeness (Genesis 1:27). He proclaims that from this moment forward, human nature obtains a renewed dignity, sacredness, nobility, holiness, and prestige removed from that of angels only in kind (Psalm 8:5). What belongs to Jesus by nature has become ours through His election of us as His brothers.

A mere human aspiration toward God is wide of the mark for it is undertaken apart from any awareness of God�s loving election of man. In the mysticism of Yoga, the apprehension of the divine is attained only by the complete surrender and dissolution of the ego, and any sense of encounter is deemed falsehood and illusion. Little wonder then that the holy men of India and Tibet, for example, stand aloof from moral issues, and the highest goal of Hinduism and Buddhism is to shed the fetters of moral action by overcoming the inclination to be active altogether. But in prophetic theology, man is the object of God�s vision, concern, and understanding. It is man�s vision, concern, and understanding for God that is the prophetic goal. Man�s fulfillment and contentment, his beatitude, lies in the experience of the Transcendent One�s attention and love.

Philosophy begins with �know thyself,� and epistemology with �I think, therefore I am.� But �know thy God� (1 Chronicles 28:9) and �Lord, know my thoughts� (Psalm 139:23) are the prophetic categorical imperatives. For there can be no self-understanding without God-understanding.

To God and to His Christ, Who was, and Who is, and Who is to come, be all glory, praise, honor, and thanksgiving, now and forever. Amen!