Loving A Hidden God
The Search For God
When Augustine sat down to write his Confessions, he looked back over his years of wandering and tried to sum up the story of his personal search for God. He explained his odyssey to his new Divine friend as follows:
Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient yet ever new, late have I loved you! You were inside me all the time but I was running around outside. I was looking for you outside and, ugly as I was, I threw myself at all those beautiful things that you had made.
Confessions, 10.27
I asked the earth, "Are you the God that I search for?" and it answered "No, I am not." I asked the depths of the sea and all the creeping things and they answered: "We are not God; look above us." And so I asked the wandering winds and all the things living in the its airy breezes and they said: "Anaximenes was mistaken; we are not God." Then I went to the heavens and the sun and the moon and the stars and they cried: "We are not the God that you search for!" I pleaded "Tell me something about Him then! If you are not He, tell me something about Him!" And they cried out as one: "HE MADE US!"
Confessions, 10.6
Indeed it is true: ask the lovely earth and the lovely sea, ask the lovely breeze and the lovely sky, ask the order of the stars, ask the sun making the day alight with its beams, ask the moon tempering the darkness of the night that follows, ask the living things which move through the waters and visit the land and fly in the air, ask the hidden human soul and the human body that you can see ... ask any of these wondrous beings and hear them answer: "Indeed, we are lovely. See how lovely we are!" By their loveliness they confess their God. Who but Loveliness Himself (that is, the unchanging beauty that is God) could make even such passing things be so lovely?
Sermon 241, 2.2; 3.3
Augustine searched for perfect peace and happiness in many different places throughout his life. As a young boy he sought it in games. As an adolescent he sought it in being accepted. As a young man he sought it in romantic love. For a while sensual satisfaction became his god. And then it was reason. And then it was career. For a while he believed in no gods, no truth, no certainty. Each of these gods proved to be unsatisfactory. Sensuality became boring. His romantic attachment to his common-law wife came into conflict with his career. His dream of the coldly rational mind capturing wisdom foundered on the reality of his uncontrolled passions. No one and nothing in this world seemed to have the answers to life. Even non-belief proved to be nonsense. All the earthly gods that he had run after so vigorously finally failed him.
Then his search for the true God began in earnest. He had known Jesus Christ for 30 years. Now he began to listen to Jesus speaking through the sacred scriptures and in his own heart. Finally, when Augustine was about 30 years old, he came to believe in the Lord-GOD Jesus Christ. It took him three more years before he had the strength to act on his belief and embrace God. At last he did so and was baptized. He did not yet possess God, but he now reached out to him.
To the end of his days on this earth Augustine continued his pursuit of God. He rejoiced in what he knew but he realized that his knowledge of God could be only partial. He rejoiced in his own desire for God but he knew that his grasp was tenuous. He knew that there was still a chance of messing up his life again. He was prudently fearful of his own ability to shut the doors of his life on God, just as once before he had held the doors tightly closed against him. Having found God, he did not cease his prayer "Let me know myself; let me know you!" He knew that at any moment he could fall again into darkness, not because the Divine Light had ceased to shine, but because he had closed his eyes.
We can learn many lessons from Augustine's search for God. Of course he cannot tell us where or how to find God. God comes to us individually in a way that is fitted to our particular history. But there are some facts about the search for God that are as true for each of us as they were for Augustine.
The first fact about our search is that we must be FREE to believe and love the Lord. Augustine describes the human spirit as being caught in the middle between creation and God. (On the Quantity of the Soul, 34.78) Only the angels are equal to the human soul in dignity and only God is above it. Both God and creation have their own beauty. Both are good in their own way and our great spiritual powers enable us to appreciate that goodness. We are conscious of the good that surrounds us and we naturally desire it. Thus we desire the good things of this world and we desire the ultimate goodness that is God. We have an infinite thirst for good and reach out to it wherever we perceive it. Indeed, the thirst for good precedes our perception of any particular good. We are like infants who thirst for their mother's milk even before they know that there is anyone beyond themselves who can slake their thirst.
We are torn by our thirst for what is around us and for what is above us. Although God is greater than any good in this life, sometimes He can seem very far away and the things of this earth can seem more real. They are more immediate. They are instant in their satisfaction. Although the infinite good should consume our desire, it is beyond comprehension and thus we often ignore it. We want to eat, drink, and amuse ourselves with the pleasures of today. We pay attention to what is happening here and now, to how we feel and what we see and hear and taste. It is hard on some days to get excited about God. His approach is gentle. He will not force himself upon us in the way our sensuality or our ambition or the noise of this world frequently does.
And so it is that to come to believe in God we must first be free of the earthy interests which, if they come to dominate our days, will rob us of the time and energy necessary for listening with attention to a whispering Lord. This does not mean that we must run away from this world. Even were it possible it would be eminently foolish since God cannot be found except in the place where we are. We don't know where HIS house is. We can only wait for him to come to ours, and Our house now is here in the midst of the hills and valleys of this world. We need not deny this world in which we live but neither can we allow it to consume us, to trap us in our here and now.
If it does, our lives can become knotted. Going this way and that, trying to rush off in all directions at once, we become like a thread twisted back upon itself as it responds to the eccentric thrusts of its directing needle. We are knotted in place, entangled in the fabric of our present life. We can move no further and, like Augustine, we begin to turn over and over in the darkness. (Confessions, 3.11)
The possible causes of such entanglement are many:
1. passion: We may fall into the habit of living a life ruled by passion, concerned only about the needs of our body.
2. ambition: We can come to be dominated by the desire for success, where success is measured by the amount of money we have or the number of people that we dominate. We aim at being a "mover and shaker" in this world and ignore the eternal world that is ahead of us.
3. earthly loves: We may become entangled in an earthly love, devoting our life to serving that love above every other love, human or divine. Our greatest joy comes from the return of that love. Our greatest fear is that someday we will be separated. We say to our human love,
I will do anything to keep you with me.
And we mean it, even if the "anything" means ignoring the love we should have for God.
4. knowledge: It is possible to dedicate ourselves to mastery of one small area of truth (be it Art or Science), finding out all we can about a little bit of reality. We can come to know more and more about less and less till we become masters of nothing. Then we proclaim:
This piece of the world is all there is. There is nothing of importance beyond it.
5. the needs of today: We can become so consumed by our daily tasks that we simply have no time for thinking about God or anything else. If we are parents, we may worry more about getting the kids to school than getting time to listen to the Lord. If we are teachers, we may worry more about what we will say in class today than about what the Divine Teacher is saying deep inside us. If we are very sick, we may spend our day thinking more about how we feel than about our destiny.
Whatever our bonds may be, if we are tied down to this earth we shall find it hard to search for any God above. Indeed, it will be impossible even to lift our eyes.
Being a Christian does not exempt us from the danger. We like the rest of the human race are caught between time and eternity. The good things of life are good for us too. God is just as much a mystery for us. Like the rest of the human race we can spend our time seeking the "comfortable" life. Even Augustine faced the problem of candidates who came to his monastery because the life there was much more pleasant than anything they could find on the outside. They had food and a bed and people who were supposed to love them and someone to blame (the superior) if things went wrong. True their life was somewhat restricted, but what life isn't?
Being a Christian does not take away earthly ambition. We can become dominated by a desire to get a job that has some sort of independence and expense account. At times in my life I have been ready to "kill" for a job with a car attached.
Christians are also as liable as anyone else to have their lives filled with concern for family and friends. Sometimes they become the "problem solvers" for their families, taking care of aged parents emotionally and physically because other family members are too "tied up" with their own families. Christians can be consumed by their friendships, attachments that become so overpowering that the christian may come to believe that they will truly "die" if they are ever separated.
And being a Christian does not mean that one will never fall in love. Such love for another human being is not necessarily an obstacle to coming to know and love God. Indeed, Augustine suggests that only someone who is in love can understand what love of God means. He says:
If I speak to a cold person, they will not know what I am talking about.
Commentary on the Gospel of John, 26.4
True human love can bring a person closer to God. But the passion of love can make us sometimes forget the good of the loved one and the demands of God. Then human love becomes destructive and ceases to be true.
In sum, being a christian does not mean that we cease to be torn between this world and God. It just means that we have a better chance of realizing and understanding our predicament. "Being torn" between this life and the next can happen at any phase of our life and so our search for God must continue as long as we live
This is he second fact about our search for God. In this life it will be NEVER-ENDING. It continues whether we are saints or sinners. There is no moment in our lives when we can say:
The Lord has come. I have found him finally and forever.
While we live there is always the chance of losing our God, of walking away and closing our lives to him. Even if this does not happen, it is still true that we are constantly changing. We go through different stages in our lives and the Lord needs to come in different ways with different messages. When I was young the Lord came with encouragement to try new things. When I grew older and tasted success, the Lord told me not to take myself too seriously. When I fell in love the Lord helped me to love innocently, neither hurting my love nor myself. When I was sick, I needed the Lord to tell me how to bear my illness. Now that I am old, I need the Lord to tell me how to live with diminished powers. And at the moment of death, I will need the Lord most of all. Life must be a continuing "turning towards" the Lord and a faith that does not grow will perish. Each day the Lord has something new to say to me because each day is new.
The third fact about our search for God is that we need some times of QUIET to pursue the search successfully. More often than not God will speak to us in the same way as he spoke to Elijah in the Old Testament:
Then the Lord said, "Go outside and stand on the mountain before the Lord; the Lord will be passing by." A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave.
1 Kings, 19:11-13
Elijah's experience shows that God's presence is more like a gentle breeze than a hurricane, and it occurs deep inside each one of us. If there is too much noise in our lives, we cannot hear his words.
A fourth fact about our search for God
is that often our search will be in the midst of STORMS. The New Testament tells of two storms that Jesus and his disciples lived through. In the first storm (Luke 8: 22-25) Jesus was in the boat with the disciples. He was close to his friends but this neither stopped the storm nor prevented them from being scared half to death. Eventually the storm ceased (as all storms do) but not until they had lived through some stormy hours together. The disciples were able to appreciate the presence of Jesus only after they realized that they had survived as long as he was in their boat.
In the second storm (Matthew 14: 22-33) Jesus was on the shore and the disciples were already out at sea. The storm came up and Jesus came to his disciples over the waters. He called out to Peter to join him in the very midst of the swirling waves. Peter tried but lost faith and began to sink. Jesus saved him and they began to talk to each other while the storm continued to blow its way out.
The lessons of the stories are clear. The first is that being a follower of Christ is no protection against storms in life. The second lesson is that turmoil in life is not a sign that the Lord is far away. He may be in our boat but our pain and terror make it harder to hear his reassuring voice. It is hard to see the Lord when the skies grow dark, but he is there nonetheless, hearing our prayers. Sometimes we don't think he answers our prayer because the storm continues. Only later do we realize that storms are conquered more by living through them than by doing away with them. If we listen carefully in the midst of our storms, we may hear the same words that Jesus spoke to his frightened disciples:
Get hold of yourselves! It is I. Do not be afraid!
Matthew, 14:27
We need not travel to some foreign land to the find the Lord. If we wait patiently, he will come to us and speak to us in the midst of our ordinary days. We must clear our eyes and spirits of anything that can dull our vision, freeing ourselves of the tentacles of our times that may hold us down. But once that is done we can only wait patiently, stuck in that place in life that God's Providence has prepared for us. We are nailed in place and for many whose place is one of pain and suffering and affliction this means being nailed to a cross. Nailed to that special cross that is our life, we cannot run to the Lord at all. All we can do is wait for him and turn our head in his direction. But we can and must pay attention to him, just as Jesus nailed to the cross turned his head to pay attention to his mother standing there at his feet.
We must pay attention to God both by looking forward and looking back. As we lie nailed to our present we can take time to look into our future, reminding ourselves that all our present moments are passing and that someday we too shall die and be led home by the Lord. We can pay attention to the Lord by trying to remember our future, remembering that the Lord is in our future and that even now he is drawing us forward to meet him.
We can also pay attention to God by looking back. Living in our present we can remember the times when Jesus walked this earth and spoke to ordinary humans. What he said to them he says now to us. What he promised them, he promises us now. If we read the scripture stories with attention, we shall come to know that Jesus has promised that our search for God will be successful if we do not give up, if we want to find him, if we hope to find him, if we allow him to find us. Reading these promises we can pray with joy the prayer Augustine prayed when he was still in the midst of his own search for God:
Our Father, you encourage us to pray to you and then you accomplish in us what we pray for. Hear me as I tremble in the darkness; reach out your strong hand to me. Hold your light before me and call me back from my wanderings, so that with you guiding me I may return again to myself and to you.
Soliloquies, 2.6