Jean-Yves Lacoste is a Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and world-renowned phenomenologist. This is what part of his bio says in a book titled 'Transcendence and Phenomenology' (SCM Press, 2007). In that book his essay 'Perception, Transcendence, and the Experience of God', brings together insights from diverse fields and carries implications for still others; so, let me try to explain.

Imagine you are standing in your kitchen and your gaze lands upon your microwave. There it sits – shiny white plastic with a glass front. It has six sides. It is a cube. Coming from the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and other phenomenologists, Lacoste says that there is a difference between sensation and perception in regards to how you are related to that microwave. That is, you see the microwave, the cube, but you really only sense at best three of its sides. If you move around in the kitchen, you view it from varying perspectives and perhaps see at any one time only two sides, or even only one. What you see depends on where you happen to be in the kitchen. What you see, what you sense in your visual field, is an incomplete object, but what you perceive is a completed whole. The visible is the vehicle of the invisible; what you see carries with it what you can't see. Lacoste says: "The first-order belief is that there are things outside the field of consciousness. The second-order belief is that what appears to us lets the non-phenomenal [the invisible] appear as well."

Your microwave is an intentional object. It can be called intentional, because it is a mental act of perception to comprehend that you are seeing something with a presence that you cannot sense completely but that actually exists. In this way you transcend the limits of mere sensation on your way to a full perception, and you have real, if only partial, contact with an actual microwave.

Are you following? Not yet? Well, think of it going the other way around, when perception does not develop out of mere sensation.

We have a young kitten in the house. Today I watched that cat playing. It picked up a toy that is a stick with a scarf-like object attached to one end. We usually hold the stick-end and wave the scarf around, which gets the kitten chasing it. Today, however, the cat picked up the whole object where he found it on the floor, and he picked it up by the scarf-end. Then he noticed the stick extending out from his mouth. While still holding the scarf-end in his mouth, he proceeded to chase the stick-end, going round and round in circles but never able to get to the other end of what he was seeing, because it was always just a few inches ahead of him. In that case the cat could see something, had sensation, but did not perceive the whole toy. Understand? According to Lacoste, and the philosophy of phenomenology, he had sensation without perception.

In my practice of psychotherapy and also in my work as an organisational consultant and coach, I see this happening repeatedly. People see something going on, but they don't get the whole picture. They have sensation without perception. They have an experience, and they surely feel something physically and emotionally, and they have thoughts about what they sense, but they do not actually perceive. They chase the stick and go around in circles, often feeling confused and miserable.

In gestalt therapy one of the teaching devices people use to talk about cycles of contacting and experiencing in the world is called the cycle of experience. In that cycle people move through stages and the first two are "sensation" and "awareness". Now, there is always sensation and there is always awareness in each stage of contacting, but if we understand, we realise that the difference between the first stage and the second is this same difference about which Lacoste wrote. In contacting, and thus in having a full experience in life, we must move from naïve sensation to the awareness that tells us what our sensation is about.

I realised while reading Lacoste that this is also the way it is in one's ability to experience God. Jesus repeatedly ended a story or lecture by saying, "he who has ears, let him hear". Over and over again he would say this to people. He was not talking about simple sensation. He was talking about perception. For instance, the religious leaders saw Him not using ritual hand washing, and they observed Him healing on the Sabbath, and they criticised Him, but He responded by saying that it is not what goes into a person that defiles him, but what comes out, and that human beings were not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for human beings. If one could perceive rightly, then, one would see that God was not about rituals and the observance of special days. These simply provide sensation and the opportunity to perceive if one has the capacity to see what one hears.

Christ's ministry was largely a matter of moving people from simple sensation into awareness. It was all about standing in the kitchen and perceiving the microwave – standing in the emerging kingdom of God and perceiving Emmanuel (a name applied to Jesus, which means "God with us"). Jesus said "He who has seen me has seen the Father", but most people simply saw Jesus without perceiving the Father.

I find it interesting that in the last book of the Bible, as if to remind people of the difference between simply seeing or hearing and actually perceiving and understanding, the Holy Spirit says to the churches, "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches".

I wish we could listen more intently to what we see. We often have the scarf in our mouths and are chasing the stick based on what we can see without perceiving the whole, and this extends to the spiritual life as well. If we simply see the bread and the wine, a religious ceremony, without perceiving God at work in our lives through the sacrament and through faith, we have ears but do not hear; we have eyes but do not see.