Meaning of “Intimacy” with God

2 Corinthians 13:14 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all! So be it!

John 15:15 – “I will not now call you servants … but My friends.”

What is intimacy with God? There are many aspects to intimacy with God, among them: God’s presence, our friendship with God, our knowledge of God, our understanding of God’s ways and ability to hear his voice, God’s knowledge of us, our filial fear (as opposed to servile fear) of God, our purity of intention in seeking God, and above all, our fellowship and conversation with God.

These are all interrelated concepts, of course. In the course of this writing, we hope to examine how these concepts relate to one another, draw some important distinctions, and discover along the way how to better follow the Savior.

But the starting place in considering the many aspects to intimacy must be friendship. Unlike the word “intimacy,” the scriptures explicitly mention “friendship” multiple times to describe the highest (and most intimate) possible relationship with God. So if we are to answer the question “what is intimacy with God,” we must begin asking “what is friendship with God”?

St. Thomas Aquinas asks this very question in his Treatise on Charity, and concludes that charity and friendship with God are the same thing. His reasoning is as follows. First, he says, “not every love has the character of friendship.” Using Aristotle’s definition of friendship, he points out that self-interested love can not qualify as friendship. True friendship must have an element of “benevolence” by which he means that it must desire the good of the friend. Love without benevolence is mere concupiscence. It is the kind of love we have for a good wine or a fine horse. “It would be absurd,” he concludes, “to speak of having friendship for wine or for a horse.” Likewise, friendship with God cannot be based solely on what God can do for us.

C. S. Lewis[1] in his small masterpiece, The Four Loves, has examined this question in great detail. In this work Lewis draws a distinction between what he calls Need-Love, Gift-Love and Appreciative Love. Need-Love, as Lewis defines it, is very similar to what St. Thomas would call the concupiscent or self-interested love, a love which seeks to satisfy a need. Gift-Love, as its name suggests, is a love that desires the good of the beloved. Gift-Love is similar to what both Aristotle and St. Thomas would call the love of benevolence. In The Four Loves, Lewis considers in some detail the dangers of natural concupiscent loves that start to exert claims that only God Himself should make. Such loves can exert a tyrannical influence on us, and even become, as Lewis puts it, “a complicated form of hatred.”

However, Lewis points out that human love for God is always, in one sense, a love of pure need. What could we possibly offer God, the Creator of the Universe? What good could we do Him? The answer, of course, is none. God does not need our love in the same way that we need His love. Yet St. Thomas argues that friendship for God must have an element of benevolence. If we are truly God’s friends, we must desire what St. Thomas calls “the divine good.”

The “divine good” is an abstract-sounding phrase. What could it possibly mean to “desire the divine good”? If we consider Lewis’ third category of love, Appreciative Love, I think it will illuminate what St. Thomas has in mind. Although God has no deficiencies that we can fill, and certainly no needs that we can supply, nevertheless, we can develop an appreciative love of His goodness than transcends our natural desire for our own good. When we say that we desire the “divine good” we speak metaphorically of what is, in fact, an appeciative love. For our appreciation is the one and only selfless “gift” that we can give God.

However, the normal path to God and to spiritual maturity begins with an act of self-interest: faith and hope in God’s provision and His disposition to bless us. As we learn to trust in His provision, hope for happiness and beatitude is born in our hearts. This is a form of concupiscent love that is natural, and God blesses it. But as our appreciation for His beauty and glory deepens, the concupiscent component of our love necessarily diminishes, and we learn to love God more for His own sake. Every child of God loves God more than himself at some level, but as love for God matures, the disinterested, appreciative element of that love increases compared to the concupiscent part (the part that seeks his provision and blessing). [2]

So genuine friendship for God must contain an element of benevolence, a love so deep that we care more about God’s glory than our own good, more even than our own salvation. St. Paul offers a model of this kind of friendship in his feelings towards his fellow hebrews. “I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart,” he says,
For I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brethren’s sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” [3] Paradoxically, if our our appreciative love for God is not strong enough to make us forget about ourselves, then even if we get what we think we want, we will not be satisfied!! Our own good is too small to truly satisfy our appetite. In fact, the state of self-interested beatitude does not actually exist. Only the vision of God’s glory will ultimately satisfy us, and once we see it, it will be enough for us to know that it is there, that it exists. That will be far more important to us than the desire we have even for our own beatitude.

However, St. Thomas argues that this benevolence, this appreciative desire for the divine good is still not enough to constitute true friendship! Friendship implies communication!! “Friendship,” he says, “must be based on the same communication, of which it is written (1 Cor. 1:9): ‘God is faithful: by Whom you are called unto the fellowship of His Son.’ …”  In other words, the appreciative love of God (also known as charity [4]) necessarily includes fellowship with God. With this, Thomas concludes his proof that charity and friendship are really the same thing, by saying, “The love which is based on this communication, is charity: wherefore it is evident that charity is the friendship of man for God.” Charity, then, involves not only a benevolent love for the divine good that transcends love of self; it is also a relationship founded on communication.

Why is communication such an important element of friendship with God? Clearly, friendship involves a relationship between persons, and our concept of personhood involves communication, but there is a deeper reason. Our appreciative love for God in this life, even after receiving sanctifying grace, is incipient. It is weak. As a result, our vision is dim. We see now darkly as in a mirror. [5] As long as we are guided by the glow of our appreciative love for God, we will readily find the path to Him. If that glow is bright, we will see great distances and maybe even catch a glimpse of the horizon. This will help us to avoid mistakes. If that glow is weak, we will move forward with less energy and less confidence. We will get lost more often and stumble frequently. Appreciative love of God is the oil of our spiritual lamp. It is the medium of vision. However, we cannot always wait until we see with perfect clarity before taking steps. In fact, it is a paradox of christian faith that we acquire the vision that accompanies appreciative love only after taking steps of faith in the darkness. “Crede ut intelegas,” Saint Augustine tells us: Believe, so that you might understand. [6] We will examine this paradox in great detail in later chapters.

The process by which we grow in vision is fueled by conversation with God, because when we do not see clearly and do not know which way to go, we can ask God in prayer. Conversation with God has a strange sacramental quality that we will explore in the next section. On the one hand, the conversation we have with the indwelling Spirit of God (the real presence of the Holy Spirit in our souls [7]) is God’s presence in our midst. He dwells in the soul of the christian, the temple of the New Covenant, just as He dwelled in the tabernacle of ancient Israel. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit’s presence in the soul of the wayfarer is just a pledge of what is yet to come. “Our conversation is in heaven,” [8] St. Paul tells us. In other words, we will not, in one sense, enjoy conversation with God in its fullest sense until we reach heaven. God’s conversation with us now represents His real presence, but it also assures us of a more mature and perfect conversation in heaven. We are drawn closer to that perfect conversation, even in this life, provided we heed His voice. As we heed his voice, our vision becomes clearer, but our conversation also becomes more intense. We see more clearly, but God also calls us to greater and greater steps of faith in the darkness that remains.

Conversation nourishes our growth in the womb of grace. We are a work that has not been completed. God created the universe in seven days, but His creative energy is still at work in us. Paul speaks as though all of creation were in labor pains giving birth to God’s adopted sons: “And we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now. And not only so, but ourselves also, who have the firstfruit of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, awaiting adoption, the redemption of our body.” [9] We are like unborn children in gestation. As we prepare to be born in glory, we must receive nutrients from the Holy Spirit, and those nutrients take the form of conversation with God.

What then is required for us to cultivate conversation with God? This writing will explore the answer to this question at some length, and recommend practical steps the reader can take to deepen conversation with God. However, we wish to begin this study with a thought experiment:[10] an imaginary trip that illustrates the sacramental quality of converation with God, and then we will examine the three key prerequisites for conversation with God: purity, fear and obedience.