Why Seek God?

C. S. Lewis always makes me think, just as he usually turns standard thinking upside down.  In The Screwtape Letters, he writes:

Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist's shop.

Now most of us would, without thinking, adopt the notion that of course, mass conversions to Christianity would be the means to a just society.  And a more just society might be one outcome of the true conversion of an entire society.  But if that is the end we seek in our relationship with God, we will undoubtedly be disappointed and say with the writer of Ecclesiastes:  "All is futility, a chasing after the wind." 

God is not a means to an end, just as other people are not means to our ends.  We do not cultivate relationships (hopefully) to establish ourselves or our families or our nations in peace and security.  If we do, we will find that we have been pursuing nothing at all.  A relationship is for the sake of knowing the other person, for delight in the other--go back to yesterday's entry on the Wedding Celebration. 

Of course, delight in relationship spills over into the world closest to the couple; there is peace and joy and beauty --- space into which others may enter for respite.  But those who set out to establish utopian societies on earth ultimately failed, no matter which tools, patterns, or "faiths" they employed. 

Those who join a religious group like the Franciscans, the Carmelites, or the Jesuits do so because they first have a (or want a deeper) relationship with God, who then directs their life mission into certain channels.  Even those who set out to change the world by joining the Peace Corps or Feed the Children do so because of an inner-directed spirit.  They are not seeking to convert societies but to serve them.

A poem by Edwin Hatch (1835-1889) gives us some insight into the kind of purity of heart that accompanies those who seek God:

Breathe on me, Breath of God

Fill me with life anew,

That I may love what thou dost love,

And do what thou wouldst do.

Breathe on me, Breath of God,

Until my heart is pure,

Until with thee I will one will

To do and to endure.

Breathe of me, Breath of God,

Til I am wholly thine

Until this earthly part of me

Glows with thy fire divine.

We usually think of St. Paul as setting out to change the world after his encounter with the living Christ on the way to Damascus.  However, Paul went first to Arabia (presumably the Transjordan Desert) for three years and then to Damascus  before meeting for the first time with the disciples in Jeruslem.  His "conversion" on the road was not a one-moment event, but a gradual transformation over a period of time, until "this earthly part of [him] glow[ed]" with the divine fire, until, as he later said, "it is no longer I that live, but Christ who lives in me to the glory of the Father." 

This is also what we seek---not to change the world, but to be set on fire until Christ in us can accomplish His will in us.