Touched without Knowing

 


Not all divine touches are felt. Some arrive quietly, beneath awareness, shaping us without sensation. We often equate God’s touch with comfort, healing, or directive moments we can name. Yet the mystics remind us that grace often works invisibly, unnoticed until its fruit appears.

🌿 Hidden Touches

  • Unfelt Consolation: Catherine of Siena wrote that God “touches the soul in ways she cannot perceive.” The absence of sensation does not mean the absence of contact.

  • Interior Work: Teresa of Ávila taught that even when prayer feels dry, “the divine hand is still at work within.”

  • Unseen Healing: Some recover from illness or despair without any dramatic moment of touch, only later realizing that grace had been quietly at work.

  • Daily Providence: A sudden calm in crisis, a strength that appears when needed, or a peace that settles after prayer—all may be touches unnoticed at the time.

🌿 Why We May Not Feel Them

  1. God’s pedagogy: He teaches us to trust His presence without relying on sensation.

  2. Human limitation: Our senses are not tuned to every movement of grace.

  3. Fruit over feeling: The proof of touch is not the sensation but the transformation it leaves behind.

🌿 How to Respond

  • Trust the unseen: Believe that God’s hand is at work even when you do not feel it.

  • Attend to the fruit: Look for peace, humility, or courage as signs of hidden touch.

  • Rest in faith: Sensation is gift; presence is promise.

  • Give thanks: Gratitude for unseen grace deepens awareness of God’s constancy.

🌿 The Mystery

“He touches the soul so gently that it knows Him without seeing.” — Teresa of Ávila

God’s touches may be felt, unfelt, or hidden. But they are never absent. Sometimes the deepest work is done in silence, unnoticed until we realize we have been changed.

image and some research contributed by AI


post inspired by Blest Atheist by Elizabeth Mahlou

Book Description:

As a young child, outraged by the hypocrisy she finds in a church that does nothing to alleviate the physical and sexual abuse she experiences on a regular basis, Beth delivers an accusatory youth sermon and gets her family expelled from the church. Having locked the door on God, Beth goes on to raise a family of seven children, learn 17 languages, and enjoy a career that takes her to NASA, Washington, and 24 countries. All the time, however, God keeps knocking at the door, protecting and blessing her, which she realizes only decades later.
Ultimately, Beth finds God in a very simple yet most unusual way.
A very human story, Blest Atheist encompasses the greatest literary themes of all time – alienation, redemption, and even the miraculous. The author’s life experiences, both tragic and tremendous, result in a spiritual journey containing significant ups and downs that ultimately yield great joy and humility.


Book review

Brendan M. Howard
Flawed protagonist, honest struggles
DISCLAIMER: I received this book as an early review copy.

Elizabeth Mahlou's autobiography and tale of coming to believe in God has a lot going for it.

Her candid descriptions of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of relatives gripped this reader in a flood of sympathy and horror. Mahlou's great reserve of optimism and compassion as child and adult seems initially boastful. But in light of her life of childhood trauma, physically and mentally challenged children of her own, her commendable hunt for intellectual success, and a cycle of poverty that she constantly fights to escape, readers will find themselves rooting for Mahlou more than most any other autobiographical subject in English letters. The story of her hurts and triumphs, unlike those of writers reeling from the obscene horrors of the Holocaust, horrific genocidal wars, or horrendous serial killing drama, is scary in its possibility. Parents who don't know how not to hit their kids? Medical and educational leaders who blindly try to force or refuse treatment to her children? These are realities for many, and her strength will be succor to those fighting against establishment figures.

But Mahlou's chief reason for writing this very personal tale is not to offer succor, but to tell the story of how an atheist came to believe in God. As a very intelligent, very compassionate nonbeliever-turned-Christian, Mahlou is a captivating example of religion's pull even for those who aren't writhing in self-pity, aren't blind to all but childish reasons for religious belief and aren't obediently following their parents' and parents' belief systems.

This is a tale of belief hard-fought-against, wisely considered, and spiritually experienced.


For more posts about Elizabeth Mahlou and her books, click HERE.
For more posts about religious conversion, click HERE.
For more posts about atheism, click HERE.
For more posts about spirituality, click HERE.
For more posts about God, click HERE.



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