She Went in Haste to the Mountain (Page 166)

CHAPTER THREE

THE UNSEARCHABLE
WAYS OF GOD

For more than a year, on the high mountain at Garabandal, strange and incomprehensible affairs were transpiring . . . disturbing to the wise and prudent. (Luke 10:21)

They could not understand the purpose of this.

They could not understand why this was taking place there.

If God wanted to communicate something, He could do it in a more direct and simple manner, without such a barrage of strange affairs.

And He could do it soon.

The hope and expectation were taking too long. And there were reasons for not accepting as coming from God — Who is the Light — this melange of phenomena that even after such a long time was not clear as to its plan or purpose.

Things of God — think the learned — necessarily have to be more intelligible. They walk on the terrain of reason. But for the learned and unlearned alike, this proclamation from God was written in the Old Testament centuries ago:

My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor your ways My ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are exalted above the earth,
So are My ways exalted above your ways,
And My thoughts above your thoughts. (Is. 55:8-9)

And with the coming of the Word into the world, the situation did not change. In the middle of the New Testament stands this formidable statement from the greatest preacher of the Gospel:

Oh, the depth of the riches
Of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!
How incomprehensible are His judgments,
And how unreachable His ways. (Rom.11:33)

Today it is often said that the important thing is the Bible; that is everything.

All right, but is the Bible a series of lessons logically co-ordinated, perfectly explained, and easily intelligible? If there are broad ways, they are those of the Bible, that is to say, the ways of the History of Salvation.

If there are ways of confusion, they are those of God in the courses of that History.

In attempting to explain to people what the Bible was, a scriptural scholar wrote in a popular review:

“Open the Holy Book, what do we find there? Many think they will find sublime ideas and marvelous theories concerning God, man, and the world. What a disillusion! Next to exciting stories, we find others very trivial, harsh, and unacceptable to our mentality.

All these texts confuse us. Why? Because of the inaccurate idea of God’s revelation to us. We imagine God as a type of theology professor, as a preacher who speaks well and says elegant things.

God reveals Himself to us, coming down to meet us, walking with us, adapting himself to our steps — even our stumblings, falls, ignorance. Jesus spoke to His disciples of things that you cannot understand now; the Spirit of Truth will give you the understanding of everything later.

These words express better than any theory the pedagogy always used by God in His revelation. He knows that it is not possible to give everything in the first lesson. Such love! He adapts Himself to us. When we were children, He spoke to us as children. That is to say, He limited Himself to being at our side, without our even noticing Him. And He does not hurry to take away our stubbornness. The Bible is the history of the perennial association and conversation between God and man."

(El Santo — January, 1972)

It seems to me that it is not difficult to understand the Virgin’s association and conversation with us — through the girls — which has been the basis of the amazing story of Garabandal.