There are three spiritual elements that distinguish us from the rest of known creation.

(They are present in everyone, although our spirits, being delicate things, are all-too-often twisted and damaged, starved into insubstantiality, or overwhelmed and imprisoned in spiritual cages of pride, lust, envy, and so on.)

The first is what we might call moral sensibility, which has both an emotional component (empathy, pity, gratitude) and a cognitive/willful component (the recognition of fairness, of the difference between good and evil, along with the resultant motivations.)

The second is aesthetic sensibility, which responds to and feels gratified by beauty in all its guises (the emotional element), and strives to create beauty (the cognitive/willful.)

The third is what we might call rational sensibility, or simply, understanding. The emotional element here is the longing for and love of order, and the cognitive/willful element is the ability to recognize that order, along with the motivation to seek for it and make use of it.

These of course touch upon and blend into each other in many ways, as the functions of the physical body do. Your body’s ability to metabolize food is related to your body’s ability to heal itself. Just so, your sensibility to visual beauty may be related to your abhorrence of cruelty. But the distinctions – though in the substance of an actual life, they may blend and mix in various ways – are still real.

Our rational sensibility is today’s focus.

John’s Gospel uses the thought of logos – the Word – to express the Christian revelation that Jesus is both the order in creation, and that in each of us which recognizes and responds to that order. The truth, as Jesus represents it, is not simply a correspondence between propositions and reality; it is the shape of reality itself, and the resonance between that reality and our own spirits.

There is, therefore, a certain comic absurdity in questioning or contending that God does not exist, since that which can contest and contend rationally is itself God in us.