The Biography or the Beloved: When We Trade Intimacy for Information

There’s a particular kind of person I’ve come to recognize at conferences and retreats, even in parish Bible studies—and if I’m honest, I’ve been this person more than once. They sit near the front, pen poised over a leather-bound notebook already half-filled with notes from previous sessions. They ask the questions that begin with, “Could you clarify the relationship between...” They have a Logos Bible Software subscription and seventeen translations and can tell you what the Greek really means.

And when the topic of growing closer to God comes up, their answer is almost always the same: study more, read the Bible more, learn more.

Even if this isn't you, you might be influenced by the same idea. That to grow closer to God, the answer is study my Bible more. That can be a good, and helpful, thing to do. But I'd remind you, for the larger part of Christian history, even at the time of the New Testament, people didn't have Bibles to study. Yet, in the text of the New Testament, that doesn't stop Paul from encouraging them to "work out their own salvation," or to draw closer to the heart of God. He doesn't say, "alright, I wrote this awesome letter, sit down and study it, parse it out, figure out every detail." In Colossians 1:9-10, Paul does pray that believers would be "filled with the knowledge of his will." But look at the purpose he attaches to that knowledge:

"...so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God."

I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it for a moment before you answer. Imagine a marriage in which one spouse decides that the way to love the other better is to read books about them. Books about their psychology, their family of origin, their personality type. The spouse fills notebooks. They underline passages. They cross-reference. But they rarely sit down on the couch with their beloved in the evening. They rarely just are with them. They are always learning about rather than being with.

We would recognize this immediately as a kind of avoidance.

And yet in our spiritual lives, we praise it. We even call it devotion.

 

The Subtle Substitution

There is a quiet substitution that happens in the soul of the serious Christian, and it happens so gradually that we hardly notice. We begin by wanting God. We end up wanting information about God. The two feel similar from the inside. They use the same vocabulary. They occupy the same hours of the day. But they are not the same thing, and one can starve while the other grows fat.

St. John of the Cross saw this with terrible clarity. In the third book of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, he speaks of what he calls the “darkening of the memory”—a phrase that sounds frightening until you understand what he means. He is not advocating ignorance. He is not telling us to throw away our Bibles or to stop thinking. He is warning us that the very faculties God gave us to know Him can become idols if we are not careful.

“Spiritual persons allowing themselves this knowledge and reflection will necessarily fall victim to many falsehoods,” he writes. “Often the true will appear false, and the certain doubtful, and vice versa, since we can hardly have complete knowledge of the truth” (The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 3, Chapter 3).

Notice what he is saying. He is not saying that knowledge is bad. He is saying that knowledge, when pursued as if it were the destination, taking an inordinate place in our heart, deceives us. The pursuer of spiritual knowledge begins to mistake the map for the territory, the menu for the meal, the biography for the beloved. And the worst part is that the deception feels like progress. We are reading more. We know more. We can articulate more. Surely we are growing.

Are we?

 

The Appetite That Looks Like Holiness

As I was reading St. John of the Cross this morning, this was the line I highlighted and underlined: “the mere desire for this knowledge and reflection is already an appetite” (The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 3, Chapter 3).

An appetite. Like any other appetite. Like the appetite for food, for praise, for comfort, for control. The desire to know more about God can be just as much a hunger of the fallen self as the desire to be admired or the desire to be right. And the devil, who is no fool, knows this.

He is perfectly content to let you fill your head with theology if it keeps you out of the silence where God might actually meet you.

He will gladly hand you another book if it means you will not get on your knees.

This is why John warns that such pursuits “often become cause of vainglory, to judge others, to think too highly of oneself” (The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 3, Chapter 3). The knowledgeable Christian is in special danger of a particular sin, and it is a sin that wears the costume of virtue. We begin to measure ourselves against others. We notice who has read what we have read. We grow impatient with homilies that do not feed our intellectual appetite. We become connoisseurs of teaching, critics of preaching, judges of our brothers and sisters who, we suspect, have not done the reading, whose ideas aren't as refined as ours, or worse, have ideas that conflict with our own.

St. Paul saw this danger long before John did. To the Corinthians, a community absolutely intoxicated with knowledge and spiritual gifts, he wrote: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge” (1 Corinthians 8:1-2, NRSV). The Greek verb here for “puffs up” is physioi—it literally means to inflate, to fill with air. Knowledge expands us, yes, but with what? With air. With nothing. Love, by contrast, oikodomei—it builds, like a house, something that can be lived in. One puffs us up like a balloon. The other constructs a home.

Paul is not anti-knowledge. He has just told them, a few verses earlier, that he and they both know certain things about idols and food. The point is sharper than that. The point is that anyone who imagines their knowledge has gotten them somewhere has, by that very imagination, revealed they have not arrived.

Real knowledge of God produces humility, not arrogance. Real intimacy with the Lord produces a sense of one’s own littleness, not a sense of one’s own arrival.

 

What Mary Knew That Martha Forgot

I think of the scene in Luke’s Gospel that has comforted and convicted believers for two thousand years. Martha is busy. Martha is competent. Martha is, by every reasonable standard, the one getting things done. And Mary is at Jesus’ feet, doing apparently nothing. When Martha finally protests, Jesus’ answer is so gentle and so devastating: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41-42).

We usually read this passage as being about busyness versus contemplation, and that is part of it. But I want to suggest there is another layer. Martha was doing things for Jesus. She was working on the basis of what she knew about hospitality, what she knew about her duties, what she knew about how a proper hostess receives a Rabbi. She was operating out of knowledge and competence. Mary was simply present. Mary was not learning about Jesus. Mary was with Him. And the difference between those two things is the entire spiritual life.

The “better part” is not an absence of activity. It is an absence of the self-referential project. Mary was not working on herself. Mary was not improving her devotional life. Mary was simply receiving the One who had come.

 

The Trap of Self-Improvement Spirituality

This is the heart of what John of the Cross is warning us about, and it is a trap that the modern Christian falls into perhaps more than any other.

We have absorbed, without realizing it, a spirituality of self-improvement.

We approach our relationship with God the way we approach our fitness goals or our career development. We track. We measure. We accumulate. We have apps that count our prayers. We have plans that promise us we will be different in thirty days.

But the Lord did not come to make us better versions of ourselves. He came to make us His.

And that transformation does not happen primarily through accumulation. It happens through surrender. It happens through the slow, often unspectacular work of charity and humility, of which St. John says that even simple acts exceed all the knowledge our reading can give us.

Think of it this way. You can read every book ever written about love. You can master the literature on attachment, on relationships, on the philosophy of friendship. You will not love anyone any better until you actually go and love them. Love is learned by loving, not by reading.

And union with God is the same. It is learned in the practice of being with Him, in the practice of saying yes to the small mortifications He sends you, in the practice of bearing patiently with the brother or sister who irritates you, in the practice of silence when you would rather speak.

 

What This Does Not Mean

Let me be very clear, because this teaching is easily distorted. None of this means that study is bad.

None of this means we should prefer ignorance to learning.

The Church has always honored the mind, has always insisted that faith and reason are friends, has always produced great theologians and exegetes and scholars. The pursuit of truth about God is itself a form of love. St. John of the Cross himself was an extraordinarily learned man.

What it means is that knowledge must be pursued in the right order.

It must be pursued as a servant of love, not as a substitute for it.

Love leads us to pursue knowledge. We do not pursue knowledge as if it were the sum and substance of love. The former proceeds from the heart, the latter is disordered, and puffs up the self.

All study, especially Bible study and theological endeavors, must be done in humility, on the knees, with frequent and prolonged time spent simply being present to God. The scholar who prays is on holy ground. The scholar who has replaced prayer with scholarship has built a tower of Babel.

 

Practical Steps

How do we live this out? Let me suggest a few things from personal experience. These were lessons learned after years of study, when I discovered in myself that such had done nothing to grow my relationship with God, had done nothing to conquer sin and vice, and had failed to inculcate any virtue or intimacy with God. These are lessons learned by someone who for years, decades really, got this exactly backwards.

First, examine your appetites honestly. When you reach for that book, that podcast, that commentary, ask yourself: am I doing this to know God better, or to know more about God? Am I trying to grow in love, or to grow in something I can quietly admire about myself? The answer is rarely simple, and it is rarely entirely one or the other. But the question itself is purifying.

Second, begin to discipline yourself toward silence. For every hour of input you give yourself, give some real time to wordless prayer. Sit before the Lord with no agenda, no notebook, no plan. Let yourself be useless before Him. This will feel, at first, like a waste of time. That feeling is the appetite John warned us about, complaining at being denied.

Third, measure your growth not by what you have learned but by how you have loved. At the end of the day, ask not “what did I read today?” but “whom did I serve today, and how?” Was I patient with the person who tested me? Did I refrain from the cutting remark? Did I do the small, hidden thing that no one will ever know about? These are the actual measures of the spiritual life.

Fourth, be slow to speak about what you know. The more you study, the greater the temptation to teach, to correct, to display. Sit on it. Let the knowledge ripen in silence and prayer before you ever offer it to anyone.

The Lord is not waiting for you in your library. He is waiting for you in your living room, on the couch, in the silence, in your very heart, not necessarily on your bookshelf. He has been waiting there a long time. Perhaps tonight is the night you finally come and sit down.