The Search for God

Either God is God, or not.  Either God is everything, or God is, in fact, nothing. Religion has become so much a matter of playing in the in-between, calling God "God" when He is, in fact, not God to us.  He is just a religious image that people feel some vague obligation toward because they have been told that he saved them.  But they have not experienced his salvation the way the Israelites did.

Once you have experienced that salvation, once you have felt God's power in your life, once you have been touched by His love in your heart, then you know...the faithfulness that never fails.

 

God has no grandchildren.  Every generation has to be converted anew.  Every person has to experience the love and fidelity of God.  And every person has to make the choice for God, to decide to base his or her life on God's Word.  It is not enough to say that your mother is a Christian, that your father is a Catholic.  Until you come to that moment in your own life when you choose the God you will serve, you have not been converted. And the reason why the Scriptures do not speak to most Catholics in our own day is, quite simply, that they have never experienced this conversion.  Since they have not heard God's Word in their lives, they cannot respond to God's Word in the Bible (Richard Rohr: The Great Themes of Scripture - Old Testament. p. 44-45)

 

I would say that for most of us, the search for God begins where our own strength fails us.  Once we realize that we are hungry for the food that we ourselves cannot provide, we begin to look for answers to our deepest questions.  Once we realize that we are enslaved to something from which we cannot escape --- anger, lust, addictions, etc. -- we, like the participants in AA, begin to search for help from a "Higher Power."  And that is the point where God stoops to meet our need and to reveal to us His lovingkindness (hesed in Hebrew).

 

Deists imagine religion as the worship of a God they consider as great, powerful, and eternal.  But Blaise Pascal says that deism is "....almost as far removed from the Christian religion as atheism" (Pensees).  The Christian religion, according to Pascal, teaches two truths: that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him:  "The Christian religion properly consists in the mystery of the Redeemer, who, uniting in Himself the two natures, human and divine, has redeemed men from the corruption of sin in order to reconcile them in His divine person to God."

 

But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Christians, is a God of love and of comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom He possesses, a God who makes them conscious of their inward wretchedness, and His infinite mercy, who unites Himself to their inmost soul, who fills it with humility and joy, with confidence and love, who renders them incapable of any other end than Himself. 

All who seek God without Jesus Christ, and who rest in nature, either find no light to satisfy them, or come to form for themselves a means of knowing God and serving Him without a mediator.  Thereby they fall either into atheism, or into deism, two things that the Christian religion abhors almost equally (Pensees).

 

It has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes; I cannot prove that, of course.  But, looking around at the things I am able to observe for myself, I can see the most vibrant, joyful, and faith-filled people are those who remain in AA and who reach out to help others climb out of the pit of addiction.  These people know the Source of their power, of their vibrancy, of their life and energy.  They no longer rely on their own power and strength, for they have experienced for too long their inherent weakness and insufficiency.  Looking up, and receiving the help they sought, they are now able to become a source of strength to others.  That, in a nutshell, is the message of Christianity, one that our churches have been slow to grasp.