Michael Polanyi says that we must relate to information as clues on which we rely subsidiarily, attending from them to invite the insight of profounder pattern. The act of coming to know—the epistemic act—is not the passive transferral of explicit information from one mind to another. It is not so much information as it is transformation, the gracious inbreaking a profounder pattern of meaning and reality. The moment of insight transforms whatever we were relying on, curiously relativizing it even as it renders it preciously meaningful. It binds it and us dynamically together in this wondrous, greater real.

Our effort to indwell clues we have yet to understand as such evokes reality rather than presuming to exhaust it. Being breaks in in its telltale intimately present mystery and apprehends us. Even the words we were saying, along with our own selves, get graciously, wonderfully, altered in the encounter. “OHHHH…” we say, as reality invades and recenters us: “I get it.” Epiphany. And we can sense that we have been visited by God.