What's the difference between an unknowable god and no god? 

When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe the labor that is done on earth — people getting no sleep day or night — then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning. Even if the wise claim they know, they cannot really comprehend it. (Ecclesiastes 8:15-17)

I have been married for over thirty years. We have lived together longer than we were alive separately.

We remain in many ways unknown to each other.

There are aspects of my wife's orientation, motivation, and essential identity that are mysterious to me.

She surprises me.  She does not conform to my prior experience, my predictions, my "theory" of her.

She would surely say the same of me.

Is she knowable?  Am I knowable?

To some degree, yes.  I seem to know my wife more fully than I know our children, who I could observe from their beginning  and had some role in shaping.

I am in relationship with these barely known others. I am susceptible to influences - welcome and unwelcome - emerging from the otherness of my wife and children... and friends, colleagues, and total strangers.

Perhaps the critical issue is not that I should know them, but that I should endeavor in my relationship with them to be as open, vulnerable, and knowable as I can make myself.