Editor’s note: This text was originally published within the 9/30/1995 issue of America.
It was a quintessentially American query that was posed to me just a few weeks ago by a detailed friend: “How do I find God?”
The query was asked by a superb person, a Catholic who has lost touch together with her church. Although, like many contemporary Americans, she views herself as “non-religious,” she envies friends who live lives of religion and desires that faith for herself. Still, she is actually a skeptical woman—intelligent, well educated—living in a secular culture.
It was an actual conundrum for her: When you don’t have real faith in God, how will you seek for God truthfully? Doesn’t the search itself imply faith? Are you able to one way or the other “get” faith?
She desired to know if I had any answers for her. I did the perfect I could after which decided to ask other people of religion what they could tell my friend who asks how she will be able to find God.
When you don’t have real faith in God, how will you seek for God truthfully? Doesn’t the search itself imply faith?
Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor on the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and the creator of diverse books, including Modern American Religion and (with the photographer Micah Marty) the forthcoming Our Hope for Years to Come: The Seek for Spiritual Sanctuary.
Turn it around: how does God find me? If God is, but is ineffable, beyond beyondness, self-contained, forget it. Then God is unfindable. Moderately than seek God, eat pomegranates, shoot pool, take heed to Scarlatti, munch almonds, watch fireflies, visit the Andes. If God is, and is ineffable, beyond the gods but still relational, remember it. Then God is findable. While looking for God, eat pomegranates, etc….
God being ineffable isn’t sufficient to your search. Effable: “that which will be expressed or described in words.” “God is addressed, not expressed..” says Martin Buber. But address involves a mix of postures, gestures, stances and uses of words. “I” meets “Thou,” the “Other,” the “Different,” and, every so often, despite doubts and suspicions, disappointments and setbacks, mixed signals and unclear signs, one responds with a yes, as in “Yes, God.”
“How do I find God?” Bum steer Number One, 1995 style: Find God as yourself and yourself as God; find God in yourself and yourself in God. No. You realize yourself well enough to know the specters and the shadows, the uncontrollable will and intractable desire to cling to the old, that haunt you and hold you back. Find God as yourself or in yourself and you may soon get tired of what you’ve found.
“How do I find God?” Bum steer Number Two, 1995 style: Find God as energy, connections, nature.” No. You realize an excessive amount of about mere chaos, contingency, tarantulas and earthquakes to count on finding God immediately there.
“How do I find God?” Definitely by starting with a way of wonder and being ready for awe. God may cause you to be “surprised by joy.” However it may take billions of particulars, including affirmations, recognitions of Christ within the homeless, readings of Scriptures, experiences of friendships, transcendings of despair, for this surprise to work its way, to elicit awe from you.
“How do I find God?” The God who’s addressed and addresses effably speaks most clearly when words come into play: “Let there be light.” “Little children, love each other!” “Christ is risen.” That light can dawn in the center and be in you, so then, yes, God is “in you.” That love will be formed with Christ in the center after which there are energies and connections with the encompassing universe(s). Yes, then God is “around” you. “How do I find God?” By listening closely and, with suspicion momentarily suppressed, by responding. Awe-full, isn’t it?
“How do I find God?” By listening closely and, with suspicion momentarily suppressed, by responding. Awe-full, isn’t it?
Mary Rose McGeady, D.C., is president of Covenant House, which provides food, clothing, shelter and medical care to 41,000 adolescents under the age of 21 annually. Sister McGeady resides in Recent York City.
To help those with little awareness of religion of their lives to “find God” is commonly an awesome task. For our adolescents, whose life experience is characterised by abuse and negativism, it is particularly difficult to present the image of a giving, loving God of their lives. A technique we frequently find effective is to have them reflect on the goodness they find inside themselves and discover that goodness as coming from, indeed being, God present in them. Most of them can easily see the great inside and from there we will help them grow to be aware of a lot goodness around them, despite a lot evil.
We also find that teaching young people to hope is far easier than may be thought. They’ll quite readily transfer their latest awareness of God present within the goodness around them to having the ability to consult with that God through their very own words, that are strongest prayers. Among the most sincere prayers I even have heard in my life I even have heard in our own Covenant House chapels when kids come together, read parts of Scripture and pray in their very own words, often begging God to strengthen them, help them to forgive and be forgiven and to start out a latest life. Their ready will to depend upon God is so evident and so readily brought forth.
It seems to me that faith is indeed dormant in every child, and, despite its being banned by experience, that dormant faith will be fanned into fire. However the rekindling may take quite a lot of patience and faith within the one who fans the sparks.
“It seems to me that faith is indeed dormant in every child.”
Andre Dubus is the creator of The Times Are Never So Bad, Adultery and Other Decisions, Finding a Girl in America and a book of essays, Broken Vessels. A book of his short stories, Dancing After Hours, will soon be published. He lives in Haverhill, Mass.
For nearly 50 years I discovered God in prayer and, I feel, most of all within the Eucharist. I feel I also found God within the gift of writing. Once I began writing, as a university undergraduate, I prayed each morning that I might write well, of God and for God, and I still say that prayer. Once I was nearly 50.1 was hit by a automobile and crippled and every little thing modified: not only every physical act I performed, but the way in which my soul feels on the earth. I lost the illusion I had as a biped: that discipline and can were the sources of a full life. Because I needed to. I started surrendering to my life as a cripple, a life given to me by God. I pray more often now and love God within the Eucharist; however the Eucharist, the physical presence of God. has grow to be evident to me within the mundane. I even have come to see life as a present and every breath as a sacrament.
In my first yr as a cripple, a Jesuit friend and a girl who was my eucharistic minister told me to read the Recent Testament. They were right. I read a chapter at breakfast and a meditation by Mother Teresa, and people feed my soul. I don’t understand how other people can find God. He has given himself to me since I used to be a Catholic boy; now he has given me gratitude, and two years ago, after I was in spiritual pain, he taught me to thank him for that too; for being alive, to receive pain.
“I even have come to see life as a present and every breath as a sacrament.”
The Hon. Corinne C. “Lindy” Boggs served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1973 to 1991 and is president of Former Members of Congress. Mrs. Boggs lives in Recent Orleans and Washington, D.C.
I find God within the unfolding of the mysteries of the universe by the brave and knowledgeable astronauts and by the look of wonder within the eyes of my three-year-old great-granddaughter as she chases a butterfly. I find God within the flock of robins that unfailingly zoom all the way down to the berries in my garden on their annual escape flight from the northern winters and in my resident mockingbird that sits on the gnarled branch of an old tree and welcomes me home together with his complete repertoire. I find God in all of the evidences of boundless hospitality provided by my children and their spouses and by my grandchildren in sharing their homes and their hearts with their friends and neighbors and with those that are troubled or displaced or ailing. And I find God in an elderly neighbor looking through the crowded shelves of our corner food market for an expensive bottle of olive oil that his ailing friend greatly enjoys but cannot afford.
I find God within the memory of my husband, Hale, and my daughter, Barbara, talented defenders of human rights, and of my last-born, William, and of my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, all swirled together within the communion of saints. I find God within the love of holy tradition in my young friend, the wife of an admired rabbi, who revealed at their son’s Bar Mitzvah that she had nervously anticipated her participation within the ceremony for the reason that day of his birth.
I find God within the magnificent music of the gospel choirs of the predominantly black church congregations in Recent Orleans and in a young nun’s crooning of the French lullaby “Frère Jacques” to an emaciated Cambodian baby amid the sporadic shelling of a Thai refugee camp. I find God within the startling sight of the Washington Cathedral perched in strength and sweetness atop Mount St. Albans and curiously framed within the kitchen window of my Washington apartment. I find God within the old St. Louis Cathedral, my Recent Orleans parish church, an oasis of peace and tranquillity within the noisy, sometimes raucous, neighborhood. I find God through the instance of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who opens my mind and soul to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Most especially, I find God within the holy Eucharist, the last word act of unselfish love by his divine Son.
“I find God within the holy Eucharist, the last word act of unselfish love by his divine Son.”
John Eudes Bamberger, O.C.S.O., is abbot of the Trappist Abbey of the Genesee, in Piffard, N.Y.
I occur to live in a setting where God appears to be all over the place; he’s in nature in an unending variety of how, from the marvelous types of trees to the great thing about complex organic chemical structures. But above all God lives inside the human spirit.
That’s the reason I think that essentially the most fruitful place to look for God is at the middle of the soul of the person you like most personally and so most purely, with the best respect for the individuality and well-being of that person. We cannot find that center of the opposite without discovering, reflexively in our own spirit, the identical presence, the identical uniqueness that strives to honor the goodness that’s the opposite. There’s an elusive presence that forms the bottom of any truly personal exchange with one other. When the opposite is essentially the most loved, that presence becomes less elusive; it takes on a density that’s more readily recognized as being transcendent to the beloved and to my love. It casts a brighter light, will be felt because the atmosphere that envelopes the person of the beloved. To perceive something of this radiance that’s at the center of human life, affirming, knowing and creating what’s most precious of all things, the One Beloved, is to know that there may be an infinite, transcendent, living God who’s the key answer to the mystery of the human heart. Look intently, in quiet, with desire to see what’s most desirable in what you desire, and you’ll discover it quite natural to consider that God IS.
“Essentially the most fruitful place to look for God is at the middle of the soul of the person you like most personally and so most purely.”
Jean Morman Unsworth is an artist and freelance author living in Chicago. She is the creator of Playing With God and creator of the video series Art Shapes Faith Shapes Art.
A number of years ago, ! wrote a book called Playing With God. The title, which was my publisher’s idea, prompted me to take into consideration play— concerning the way that children can grow to be totally engrossed in it. and the way in which that adults can grow to be totally absorbed in playing, or watching, a game. It made me think that if we take our seek for God as “seriously” as we take our play, if we give it the identical enthusiasm, creativity and openness to what can occur that we give to our rest, we just might find God.
Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., is superior general of the Society of Jesus and resides in Rome.
“You wouldn’t be looking for me unless you had already found me,” Pascal suggests. On this sentence, the query posed already incorporates a solution of a kind. The query brings to mind an experience of a famous abbot within the Middle Ages. I see myself roughly in his story. This abbot used to talk thoroughly, every morning to his monks, on finding God, on looking for God, on encountering God. He carried on until the day on which a monk dared to ask him if he himself had ever encountered God. After a little bit of embarrassed silence, the abbot frankly admitted he never had a vision or a one-on-one meeting with God. Nothing surprising about that, since God himself had said to Moses, “You can not see my face” (Ex. 35:20). But this exact same God taught Moses that he could see his back as God passed across his path. “You will note me pass.” And thus, looking back over the length and breadth of his life, the abbot could see for himself the passage of God.
The One who wishes to jot down along with each of us our individual history comes and abides to live with us—often despite us. Without these respectful but definitive passages of God, our life wouldn’t now be what it’s. On this sense, it’s less a matter of looking for God than of allowing oneself to be found by him in all of life’s situations, where he doesn’t stop to pass and where he allows himself to be recognized once he has really passed: “You will note my back.”
“The One who wishes to jot down along with each of us our individual history comes and abides to live with us—often despite us.”
Helen M. Alvaré, an attorney, is director of planning and data for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities in Washington, D.C.
God is commonly at work finding you in experiences of being loved by people whose actions far transcend our limited expectations of what’s owed to us within the name of merely human justice or fairness. Your small child jumps into your arms and kisses you only for being her mother; your husband leaves you a sweet note while you arrive home late at night after work. One glimpses God’s amazing kindness in these expressions of affection that confound the merely worldly notions of what human beings owe to one another.
God can also be present within the experience of witnessing the reworking power of the word of God. Even when the word is spoken by extraordinary men and women, in extraordinary ways and settings, one watches in awe to see lives touched, modified and moved. It’s unexpected, inexplicable, within the tiny framework of human reason; but in a framework that features God, it’s gift and encounter.
“God is commonly at work finding you in experiences of being loved.”
Leo O’Donovan, S.J., is president of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
The paradox has only grown deeper for me in life’s course, namely, that looking for God at all times precedes and supports and follows any sense of “finding.” I remember so well first hearing Ignatius of Loyola’s marvelous counsel to seek out God in all things. On the time, it seemed each self- evidently true and a profound blessing. But regularly, experiencing repeatedly the universality of Christ’s cross, the hazard and anguish of the method has grow to be more clear. “I greet Him the times I meet Him,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, “and bless after I understand.” And what we understand best within the darkness, far beyond all our striving and reaching, is how way more profoundly God is in quest of us and, “with ah! vivid wings” bent on finding us.
Theresa Kane, R.S.M., is a lecturer on women in church and society. In her role as president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, she addressed Pope John Paul 11 during his 1978 visit to america. Sister Kane lives in Yonkers, N.Y.
The words “to seek out God” and even “how I do know God” don’t capture my experience as much as saying that it’s God who knows me. So perhaps I can answer the query by explaining who God has been for me.
God has modified for me, and inside me, through the years. Earlier, God was a parent, primarily a father. God continues as a loving parent—each father and mother—but has grow to be way more of a friend, a companion, an advocate. God can also be a source of power, of strength and fairly often a presence, a spirit of religion, of hope. So often I get an amazing sense that God is director, the force that propels me. The word “grace” has grow to be very meaningful for me; grace is an influence, a surge; a spiritual reality that drives my life.
My image is of God holding all that’s in her/his hand. All types of creation are precious to God, and nothing is out of God’s sight or control. This belief has enabled me to be not afraid—not of others, of human powers or of death. It’s God who directs and determines my life. My responsibility is a vigilance to all that God has called me to do and be. Life—with all its joys and sorrows—continues to vary, but I’m deeply convinced that life doesn’t end and can proceed without end in numerous forms, as God wills.
“God continues as a loving parent—each father and mother—but has grow to be way more of a friend, a companion, an advocate.”
Robert Coles, M.D., noted psychiatrist, teaches at Harvard University and is the creator of many books, including The Spiritual Lifetime of Children, The Call of Service and Dorothy Day: A Life.
We discover God, I feel, through others—through the love we Ieam to supply them, through the love we Ieam to receive from them—no small achievement and, indeed, a life-long effort. We discover God with difficulty—the obstacle of pride is at all times there, with its various types of expression: self-preoccupation, self-importance, smugness, arrogance, pretentiousness, in George Eliot’s phrase, “unreflecting egoism”—all of that hinders, squelches the movement of the mind, heart, soul outward, toward others, whom we’d come to know, trust, love, were we less locked into the prison of the self. God, then, is the nice Other and involves each of us, lives for every of us. insofar as we are able to find him through our day by day lives: how they’re lived with our fellow human beings.
The Most Rev. Patrick F. Flores is archbishop of San Antonio.
I find God by falling on my knees early within the morning and at the top of the day. In silence I pray, “Lord, help me to see you more clearly in what I say, in what I do and within the people whom I meet from each day.”
I find God within the poor, the abandoned, the elderly, the rejected. I at all times keep in mind that Jesus has assured us, “Whatever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me. For I used to be hungry and also you gave me food. I used to be thirsty and also you gave me drink. I used to be homeless and also you took me in. I used to be naked and also you clothed me. I used to be sick and also you cared for me. I used to be in prison and also you visited me.” I find God most of all after I offer a helping hand to people in such circumstances, and I thank God that I’m in a position to find him within the people I meet every day.
“I find God within the poor, the abandoned, the elderly, the rejected.”
Pheme Perkins is professor of theology at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass. She is the creator of a variety of books, including Reading the Recent Testament and Gnosticism and the Recent Testament.
The query “How do I find God?” presumes that “God” is missing one way or the other. After all, there are occasions within the spiritual life when God’s presence is missing—a slightly normal state of affairs if mystics et al. are to be believed. Presuming that one has an affordable practice of personal prayer/meditation, communal liturgical worship, study and repair, then coping with the “missing God” is roughly a matter of “waiting it out”—type of like a heat wave. God’ll be back. Probably with a latest challenge…so it’s just as more likely to be the case that finding God isn’t the issue…. God’s more just like the nasty black fly behind my ear when jogging. Easy methods to eliminate God?
“The query ‘How do I find God?’ presumes that “God” is missing one way or the other.”
The Rev. John McNamee is pastor of St. Malachy Church in Philadelphia and creator of Diary of a City Priest and the recently published Clay Vessels, a book of poems.
The philosopher Gabriel Marcel said that the believer and unbeliever can communicate only when the believer reveals the strains of unbelief in himself. We’re all St. Peter walking on the water: Believing, he walks the waves; unbelieving, he sinks into them—faith and unfaith together within the sitme person at the identical time. A venerable theology helps me very much here. The need nudges the intellect where the mind wouldn’t go for want of clarity or evidence. That nudge is named grace by the scholastic theologians. We’re all John Henry Newman in a dreary Victorian library coming to full faith by turning the pages of early church Fathers to find a way “commending itself.” Even the unbeliever Freud had such a secular hope that within the welter of human emotions the delicate thread of reason may very well be grasped and followed. Intellectus quaerens fidem: understanding in quest of faith. Our task is being attentive. What we discover is indeed a mystery of grace.
Kathleen Haser is the director of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps: East. She lives in Philadelphia.
How do you start to seek out God? In your personal life experiences! People of religion live in the idea that God has created them and the world, loves and sustains them and desires the fullness of life and justice for all. The need you express is given to you by God, so God has already found you. Take 10 minutes at the top of the day to be quiet. Say, “God, help me to know you.” Consider your day: while you felt peaceful or most yourself, when your spirit soared otherwise you were deeply moved by someone’s pain. God is there—not as an object to be found, but offering a relationship to enter into. Tell God what you might be grateful for. Read through the psalms until you discover one which speaks to you. As you grow to be aware of God’s presence in your life, ask your pals who live lives of religion to assist you to sustain your experience of God.
Anne Carr, B.V.M., is professor of theology on the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and creator of Transforming Grace.
If I were asked this query about finding faith or finding God, I might guess that the questioner already had a desire for God that entailed a type of implicit faith. I might also guess that the questioner was asking about Catholic Christianity. My hunch is that the perfect route may be for the searcher to take part in a strong liturgical experience, the easiest expression of the liturgical renewal of Vatican Council II, an experience of biblical preaching and thoughtful presiding, of music and song that’s real prayer. In such a context, the seeker would have, in a private way, the symbolic, many-leveled experience of the word proclaimed, the community in its deepest faith-action and the potential of personal communion with Christ, with God, within the Spirit. She or he may be drawn into the experience of religion, of real participation in a situation that, ideally, touches whole individuals of their intelligence, emotions and senses. In the total liturgical experience, Eucharist not only expresses faith but nourishes it.
“In the total liturgical experience, Eucharist not only expresses faith but nourishes it.”
Elie Wiesel is Andrew W. Mellon Professor within the Humanities at Boston University and the creator of Night.
“How do I find God?” you ask. I don’t understand how, but I do know where—in my fellow man.
Avery Dulles, S.J., is Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Theology at Fordham University in The Bronx. N.Y.. and the creator of diverse books, including Models of the Church and, most recently, The Assurance of Things Hoped For.
Each story of finding God is different. Individual converts bring to the method all that they’ve and are: their abilities, temperament, previous experiences and encounters, expectations, desires and anxieties. There isn’t any common rule.
My very own approach to faith was in some extent philosophical. If I were asked to call the critical turning point, I might say that it was the strain between the dictates of virtue and self-interest. Plato’s dialogues convinced me that it could be unacceptable to pursue one’s apparent advantage on the expense of what’s objectively right and just, and that nobody will be made worse by upright conduct. The duty to do good and avoid evil, I reasoned, should have its source from above, in the next personal being. An obligation that’s absolute (as that obligation evidently is) should have its source in an absolute personal being, i.e., in God. And if we can’t be injured by right conduct, there should be a future life. The One to whom we’re accountable must control our ultimate destiny and must know us through and thru. I started to contemplate that we live at all times within the presence of a private being who’s Creator, Lawgiver, Judge and Rewarder. Only after I had come to this conclusion did I begin to acknowledge the force of other proofs of the existence of God, akin to the cosmological argument and the argument from design.
These ruminations gave me the background for locating within the Recent Testament a luminous revelation of our Creator and Savior which each fulfilled and surpassed the intimations of philosophy. My personal synthesis of Platonic ethics and biblical faith was deepened and confirmed by works akin to the Confessions of St. Augustine. Studies in European history and the reading of dozens of recent authors, along with some visits to Catholic churches, regularly led me to Catholicism.
In answer to the editor’s query, then, I might say that the seek for God can appropriately begin from a mirrored image on the voice of conscience. Anyone who experiences the actual fact of ethical obligation has the makings of a belief in God and has the prerequisites for hearing God’s word fruitfully. However the hearing of that word is not going to end in faith unless it’s accompanied by prayer. “When you, then, who’re evil, know the way to give good gifts to your kids, how way more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those that ask him!”(Lk. 11:13).
Theologically, it’s correct to say that the very desire to seek out God is evidence that God is drawing us to himself. To search out him, within the last evaluation, is to be found by him.
“The very desire to seek out God is evidence that God is drawing us to himself. To search out him, within the last evaluation, is to be found by him.”
Margaret O’Brien Steinfels is editor of Commonweal magazine and lives in Recent York City.
In an age when revelations, conversions and epiphanies are preached because the precursors for a lifetime of faith, there’s something solidly reassuring about having lived with faith from the start, of being a cradle Catholic. At first, that could be expressed in a type of a childhood “magical realism,” and embedded in life shared with parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. It’s a part of who you might be and where you come from.
After all, this inevitably changes; or it should. In adolescence and young maturity, selections are made, books are read, ideas and behaviors are accepted and rejected, teachers and peers grow to be a part of our life of religion. If not, even cradle Catholics don’t survive the storms of growing in faith, as in life.
I think that many individuals on the lookout for an adult faith have of their hearts such a “cradle religion,” be it Lutheran or Methodism, Judaism or Islam. It can’t be called adult faith, but it might probably be called upon to assist support and shape adult faith. It might probably be summoned, just as those of us who’ve at all times swum in the ocean of religion can summon wealthy memories of religion given us in abundance by baptism and by the community of believers.
The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, the Crowley-O’Brien-Walter Professor of Theology on the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, is the creator of Catholicism and editor of the recent Encyclopedia of Catholicism.
I don’t consider it is feasible for any extraordinary mortal, this side of the beatific vision, to “find” God directly. I’m convinced, actually, that honest, searching, mainline believers have more in common with agnostics and even some atheists than they do with religious enthusiasts who’re certain not only of getting “found” God but of knowing precisely “his” mind and can on a large spectrum of non secular, social, political and economic questions.
To the extent that any of us “finds” God, it’s not directly, indirectly. The theological synonym for “not directly” is “sacramentally.” We come to a knowledge and experience of God through others. The invisible God is made visible through the sign of the neighbor. We all know God’s love, mercy, justice, compassion and forgiveness through the love, mercy, justice, compassion and forgiveness that we receive and share with others. That’s the reason St. John reminds us that “Whoever doesn’t love doesn’t know God. for God is love…. Those that say ‘I like God’ and hate their brothers or sisters are liars; for many who don’t love a brother or sister whom they’ve seen, cannot love God whom they’ve not seen” (1 Jn. 4:8, 20). Searching for God? Look across, not up.
“We come to a knowledge and experience of God through others.”
William E. Simon was Secretary of the Treasury from 1974 to 1977 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He’s currently chairman of William E. Simon & Sons, Recent Jersey, and president of the John M. Olin Foundation.
How do I find God? That is the everlasting query that each considering person must confront at a while in his or her life. That we grow to be ailing, become older and die means that we’ll never rest entirely content with our material and secular achievements. Our human condition leads us back to basic spiritual questions: What’s God and the way can we find him?
Thankfully, the answers to those questions don’t depend upon us alone. I think that God, in his infinite wisdom, mercy and patience, allows all of us, believers and nonbelievers alike, opportunities to seek out him along our own paths in life.
So there isn’t one answer, but many, and every brings its own value and honors God in a singular way. My very own perspective is drawn more from practical experience, slightly than philosophical speculation. I’m a lifelong Catholic who began to know God as an altar boy and have drawn closer to him as my family and I became more lively in our faith.
And what I even have come to see, probably more belatedly and imperfectly than he would love, is that God is alive in every body. I think this because I even have seen it throughout my life, in my work as an lively Knight of Malta, and most recently and most powerfully as a eucharistic minister at Morristown Memorial Hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in Recent York City. I find God inside the partitions of those hospitals as I attend to the welfare and desires of individuals, a lot of whom are terminally ailing and at all times alone and searching.
During these visits, I even have grow to be humbled by the religion that the patients exhibit as they give the impression of being to God for strength. These people, young and old, are afflicted with fatal illnesses, yet they’re at peace with God and with themselves. Again and again I even have come away from the hospital wondering if I even have given the sick and infirm half of what they’ve given me. I even have seen of their eyes that God isn’t every little thing—he’s the one thing. Once I see God’s divine work in these people, I feel profoundly grateful to them for helping me to strengthen my very own faith.
On one occasion, I used to be visiting a young man who was dying of AIDS. His body was pitifully thin, racked with pain. As we prayed together, I looked down on this poor soul and remembered Christ’s words—in any respect you do to the least of my brethren, you could have done for me.
I’ve thought of that moment several times since. And I realize that I used to be not only looking into the face of that young man—I used to be looking directly into the eyes of Christ.
So, one answer to the query “Where and the way can we find God?” may be—almost all over the place, actually, over and over right in front of us, if we just open our eyes and hearts to let him in.
“What I even have come to see, probably more belatedly and imperfectly than he would love, is that God is alive in every body.”
Tim Unsworth is a contract author and columnist for The National Catholic Reporter. His most up-to-date book, Catholics on the Edge, has just been published. He lives together with his wife, Jean Morman Unsworth, in Chicago.
“God forgive me, Father,” the Irishman whispered into the priest’s ear. “I’ve lost my faith.” It might probably occur that way. There’s nothing that holds every little thing together.
American Catholics tend to separate every little thing, as if we were sorting mail. But faith resists such a process. My faith more resembles the tides and contradictions inside the Irishman’s soul.
The Swiss Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, wrote dozens of books examining the DNA of religion. Yet toward the top of his life, when asked to synthesize all of it he responded: “Jesus loves me, this I do know, since the Bible tells me so.”
It’s that way with me. My faith convinces me that we should have some chaos within the soul as a way to dance with a dancing God.
Jane Redmont is the creator of Generous Lives: American Catholic Women Today. Her book in progress, When in Doubt, Sing, is about prayer in the fashionable world. She is a student on the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.
I need to honor your asking the query, initially. It’s a difficult and holy one, and the undeniable fact that you might be asking it signifies that you could have already, indirectly, “found God.” I write this in quotes because I’m undecided one “finds God,” and I’m positive that no two-paragraph answer offers you magic wings to fly in that direction. Nevertheless—just a few thoughts for you, with my deepest respect, on what’s going to often feel more like slogging through the mud than being carried on angels’ wings.
I keep hearing Jesus’ words to his would-be disciples who asked him, “Where do you reside?” How can we find you and what you stand for? For what and for whom do you reside and die? They asked. “Come and see,” he answered. I say to you, “Go and see.” Don’t think an excessive amount of about “finding God.” Do something, and the finding will follow. I once preached a homily about how one finds hope by committing acts of hope. It would be the same with faith. Start doing it. Any a part of it. Prayer, care of the poor, motion on behalf of justice, deep wrestling reading of fine theological texts, singing Gospel hymns or the Fauré “Requiem,” whatever is congenial to you and to your life at present.
And do it on two levels. After all, find what speaks to your deepest heart. Go to that intimate place where you might be infinitely sad, or ecstatic, or creative or talented, or bereft or deeply engaged, and there you’ll discover God, for those who enter into that place and ask what it means for you and for the world that you just are there. This can require of you each ruthless honesty and tenderness with yourself. The second level could also be much more necessary because you could have asked “How do / find God?” Go end up a “we,” a community, any Christian community—one which meets a few of your standards of mental honesty, lack of hypocrisy, sincere concern for others, non-coercive welcome to the stranger. It may be a parish; it may be a prayer group or a Catholic Employee House, or a study group, or a Women-Church liturgical gathering, or a team that cares and prays for individuals with AIDS or an adult education class with some soul and a few teeth. You could have to go searching, and you will have to try just a few different groups. Give them a likelihood. “Come and see.” Then stay for some time. See what happens. “Finding God” often happens within the midst of a “we.” That’s why so a lot of those biblical stories concerning the Holy Spirit occur to groups.
“We discover the ever-present God in our own goodness, creativity and capability for self-transcendence.”
Jon Hassler is the creator of 10 novels, including Staggerford, Grand Opening, Dear James and the recently published Rookery Blues. He can also be professor of English and writer-in-residence at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn.
I’m no authority, but I think that one finds God while on the lookout for something else, much the way in which a novelist will find that his writing style has coalesced between the lines of his novel while he was absorbed in his plot and characters and scarcely conscious of where he put his commas.
Fifty-five years ago I recall Sister Constance saying that because playing got here naturally to children, we served God by playing. What a liberating thing for us to listen to! As third graders, we’d been struggling so hard to memorize the catechism, pray five times a day and refrain from eating or drinking before Communion that we were led to consider that being good was like picking your way through a minefield. After which to be told that playing was not only fun but pleasing to God—whew.
This truth was brought home to me 30 years later, after I began seriously to jot down novels. At first, I used to be slightly alarmed to find that the deeper I went into my fiction, the less devoted I became to the rituals of Catholicism. But now after 10 novels, I’ve stopped being alarmed. As an alternative. I’m convinced that my writing springs from the identical underground current that used to feed my prayer life. I pray much less often, yet I feel involved in a useful mission. I didn’t see it coming, I didn’t ask for it, but, judging by what I hear from my readers, I appear to have been ordained to scatter my stories amongst individuals who enjoy them, value them and truly appear to need them.
Allow me just a few examples: “How do you understand a lot concerning the soul of an old man?” (This response from an elderly reader of Simon’s Night.) “Yours was the one book my mother desired to read as she lay dying of cancer. She read until she couldn’t hold the book any more, after which I read to her. She lived until it was done” (Dear James). “I’m a Lutheran minister, and now I begin to know how a Catholic priest tried to handle his not possible vow of celibacy” (North of Hope). “I’m a Jew married to a Catholic, and your book has taught me how my husband thinks” (A Green Journey).
I can’t take credit for any of this. I didn’t set out to jot down informative, consoling works. Every day, sitting down at my desk, I intend simply to inform a story as clearly and gracefully as I can. It should be windfall. It looks like play.
Catherine Mowry LaCugna is professor of theology on the University of Notre Dame and creator of God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life.
One “finds” God because one is already found by God. Anything we might find on our own wouldn’t be GOD. If we expect that by our own efforts, or our own ideas, we have now found GOD, we can have “found” only a product of our own imaginations, or needs or wishful considering. However it may be difficult to inform the difference between the true, living God and the God whom we have now devised for ourselves, a God enshrined in expected religious symbols and ritual gestures. God who dwells in light inaccessible exceeds every concept and image we have now of God; else, God wouldn’t be GOD. Ruth Burrows, a Carmelite, puts it this manner: “We would like our own version of [God], one we are able to, so to talk, carry around in our pockets slightly as some superstitious people carry around a charm. We will hold countless, loving conversations with this one, feel we have now an intimate understanding with him, we are able to tell him our troubles, ask for his approbation and admiration, seek the advice of him about all our affairs and decisions and get the reply we would like, and this god of ours has almost nothing to do with God.” The one sure path to finding the true living God is to be rid of all impediments and sin—to this end there is no such thing as a alternative but discipline, ascesis and, above all, ceaseless prayer.
One well-recognized technique to guard against idolatry is generally known as the via negativa, the trail through denial and darkness that leads us toward the effulgent lifetime of the true, living God. The entire of the Christian tradition is filled with examples and endorsements of the via negativa. At the identical time, Gregory of Nyssa, Anselm, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila and all other great theologians and mystics through the ages have balanced the angle by the “positive way,” which affirms the very real knowledge of God to be present in creation/nature, within the desires of the human heart and within the capability of human beings for deep communion with other individuals and with all creatures. Indeed, we’re made to know and love God through love of others, love of self, love of all creatures. We discover the ever-present God in our own goodness, creativity and capability for self-transcendence. God desires nothing greater than to be known and loved by us,to be in everlasting communion with us—which is why we’re indeed already found by the true, living God.
To see more answers, read this 1997 collection of responses to the query: Where can I find God?