You Won't Think Your Way To God

Subtle Traps: Part 2 — Escaping the Tyranny of Thought and Finding the God Beyond Ideas

In boardrooms and on trading floors, in polished pitch decks and precision-timed product rollouts, the head is king. We are trained, relentlessly and efficiently, to lead with it. We learn to assess, to calculate, to persuade. We forecast margins, mitigate risks, optimize growth. Even our small talk becomes strategy. In business, the heart is ornamental at best. The head drives the deal.

But step beyond the noise, past the deadlines and data, and enter, even briefly, the dim sanctuary of your own soul, and you’ll find a different order of things. For those who would go deeper into the Christian life, the mystics whisper a strange truth: here, the head must kneel. Here, the map must be set down. The heart must learn again to feel what it once knew before the world trained it out of us. And only from that forgotten chamber can God be truly found.

The mystics, those luminous pilgrims like St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, wrote not as theologians, but as lovers. They spoke in poetry, not propositions. Their knowledge was not acquired but unveiled, rising not from the mind’s sharp edge, but from the heart’s still center. “The heart,” Teresa wrote, “is an orchard watered by grace.” And in that orchard, no executive strategies will suffice. You do not climb your way to union with God. You surrender.

For those of us formed in the corporate world, where thinking is currency and vulnerability is a liability, this can feel like a kind of undoing. And it is. But it is also a returning—to something older than doctrine, deeper than belief. A Christianity not of creeds alone, but of burning hearts. A way of seeing where reason bows and wonder takes its place.

And perhaps nowhere is this paradox more beautifully embodied than in the life of Thomas Aquinas: the quiet giant of Christian intellect, the angelic doctor who gave the Church her most formidable intellectual scaffold.

He spent his years hunched over parchment, fingers ink-stained, mind ablaze. His Summa Theologiae was not just a defense of the faith, it was an architecture of thought, an attempt to hold mystery in form. He wrote as a man trying to carve stained glass from the raw stone of logic. Every proposition a column, every rebuttal a buttress. Reason was his chisel, the mind his monastery.

But then, near the end, silence.

It came not in debate, but in a chapel. During Mass, on a winter morning in Naples, the great mind stopped. The words fell away. God came not as syllogism but as vision. What Thomas saw, he never wrote. But when they urged him to finish the Summa, he refused. “I can write no more,” he said. “All I have written seems to me like straw compared with what I have seen.”

Straw. Not error. Not vanity. But straw, dry and light and lifeless, beside the flame.

The Church did not discard his work. Nor should we. The mind is a noble gift. God fashioned it, too. Reason is the road that leads many to the threshold. But the threshold is not the destination.

The mystics knew, and Aquinas came to see, that true faith cannot be caged in argument, no matter how brilliant. It cannot be reasoned into the soul like a theorem proved. It must be seen, felt, undone within you. It must be heard in silence and tasted in fire. It is the voice in the wind that Elijah heard, the stillness that split Thomas open.

For the soul is not saved by clarity. It is saved by love. And love, as we all discover in time, begins where reason ends.

Centuries after Aquinas fell silent, another figure walked into the darkness. This time not a scholar, but a poet-monk. John of the Cross, a man whose brilliance could have secured him a life of comfort and acclaim, chose instead the hidden paths. He was imprisoned by his own brothers, starved, beaten, left to rot in a stone cell barely wide enough to kneel in. And there, in filth, in solitude, he began to sing.

"On a dark night," he wrote, "kindled in love with yearnings, oh, happy chance! I went forth without being observed, my house being now at rest."

This was not metaphor. It was his gospel. The head cannot guide you through such nights. Only love can. Only the heart, stripped of all idols, even the idol of understanding, can go on. The mystics called it the via negativa, the way of unknowing. The mind flails in such spaces. The heart learns to listen.

Even earlier, in the golden heat of Egypt’s deserts, the first Christian monks—those strange, beautiful men called the Desert Fathers—fled the cities not to escape the world, but to escape its noise. They knew that the devil rarely attacks the body. He distracts the mind. So they fled to caves and silence, where the real battles begin.

Abba Moses once said, “Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” What did he mean? Not that you must leave the world. But that you must find your desert within it. That place inside where the mind no longer runs the show, where the heart, long exiled, begins to remember its native tongue.

They did not write much. They lived what cannot be written.

And so, if you have spent your life in conference rooms and corner offices, if your instincts are to think through, to plan out, to optimize… take heart. There is no shame in a trained mind. But there is a higher wisdom waiting, and it will not come by effort. It will come by surrender. Not analysis, but awe. Not intellect, but intimacy.

God is not an object among others. He is not even the highest being. He is Being itself—so infinite, so other, that whatever we imagine of Him is not Him. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Whoever you think God is, you are wrong. That God does not exist.

This is not a failure of faith but the beginning of it.

The mind reaches for categories, shapes, resemblances. But God has none. He cannot be captured by thought, for He made thought. He cannot be reasoned toward, for reason is the faintest candle in the face of His sun. It is not by thinking that we come near, but by surrender.

“By love,” says The Cloud of Unknowing, “God may be gotten and held; but by thought, never.”

And again: “Of God Himself no man can think. And therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to love that thing that I cannot think.”

This is the soul’s true work, to release its grip on knowing and fall into trust. To love what cannot be named. To walk, as the mystics did, not by sight or certainty, but by a dark radiance that illuminates only as far as the next step.

To go on in that darkness is not to be lost. It is to be led.

So how, then, does one begin? How does a mind sharpened by spreadsheets and strategy learn the language of the heart?

It begins not with addition, but with subtraction.

1. Embrace Silence.

Not the absence of sound, but the presence of stillness. Set aside ten minutes, no more, in the early hours, before your phone wakes. Sit. Do nothing. Listen. The heart does not shout; it whispers. And God cannot be heard over the churn of productivity.

2. Fast from Information.

You are likely glutted on input. Podcasts, Substack articles, Slack threads, updates. Try fasting, not from food, but from knowing. Choose one evening a week with no screens, no stimulation. Let your mind hunger. The quiet ache that rises is not emptiness. It is invitation.

3. Read the Mystics Slowly.

Choose a single line from The Cloud of Unknowing or Teresa’s The Interior Castle. Don’t read to finish. Read to be read. Let a sentence haunt you all day. Let it follow you into meetings, onto airplanes. Let it undo you.

4. Let Beauty Disrupt You.

Art. Nature. Music. Not for utility, but for wonder. Look at something beautiful and don’t analyze it. Let it hurt. Let it open you. The head wants to explain. The heart wants to weep. Weep.

5. Love Someone Without Winning.

Practice a kind of love that has no ROI. That goes unseen. That does not improve your brand. Speak gently to someone who cannot help you. Ask questions to which you already know the answer, but ask them anyway, for love’s sake. This is how the heart learns to beat again.

And above all, be patient. The mystic’s path is not efficient. It cannot be scaled. It is not the climb of a ladder but the slow surrender of all ladders. The head resists this. But the heart remembers.

Martin Shaw and Paul Kingsnorth recently riffed on this idea in a recent Substack conversation entitled Wild Unreasoning, which can be found here. I highly recommend listening to the entire discussion, but Paul hits on the idea of putting argumentation aside, beginning around the 17:00 mark.

Somewhere beneath the algorithms and the accolades, you are still a child before God. He waits not at the end of your thoughts but at the beginning of your longing.

---

---