June 24, 2009

discovering God

“To the spiritual perplexity which exercised
so many of the rarest souls of the nineteenth century,
God appeared as a Being
whom men desired to find but could not.
But such a formula,
though it truly represented one side of their situation,
can never represent the whole of any human situation.
For God is also a Being
whom it ill suits any of us to find
but from whom we cannot escape.
Part of the reason why men cannot find God
is that there is that in Him
which they do not desire to find,
so that the God whom they are seeking
and cannot find is not the God who truly is.
Perhaps we could not fail to find God,
if it were really God whom we were seeking.
And indeed the deepest reality of the situation
is that contained in the discovery,
which alone is likely at last to resolve our perplexity,
that when we were so distressfully
seeking that which was not really God,
the true God had already found us,
though at first we did not know
that it was He by whom we had been found.
There is a saying,
’Be careful what you seek; you might find it.’
And some who have sought God
only as a complacent ally of their own ambitions
have found Him a consuming fire.”
- John Baillie