And so this question of whether God is hard to find puts the answer solely up to us. Most of us are like the man who had lain at the Pool of Probatica for thirty-eight years and was not cured. His excuse was that, when the waters were stirred, there was no one to put him in: He needed healing, but he really did not want it. There are many like him, who remain just as they are, blaming others for their condition. But when Our Lord appeared, He told this man to do the very thing he had thought was impossible, namely, to take up his bed.
What had been wanting was his will. He was moribund because he did not want to be better. So many failures in life are, like this, avoidable, needless; they persist only because no effort is made to remedy the condition. We today say we do not want war; but we want the things that cause war. In the same way, there are many who say they want to be happy, but they refuse to want that which will bring them happiness. "You seek me, and shall find me, when you shall seek me with all your heart." - Jer. 29:13 - The basic reason why people are unhappy in this life is because they do not truly desire happiness.
In all literature, there is nothing so expressive of the inescapable presence of God as Psalm 138. The argument seems to be that we can escape from anything that is finite: Space and time are the environment of every escape, but the inescapable is the Infinite. To take one's life offers no escape, for the suicide falls into the hands of the living God. Self-destruction is possible only because one can contemplate another "state" preferable to this, even though he calls it non existence. Death through any other cause is still no escape, for He, from Whose hands we came, awaits to take us back, bearing with us the responsibility of all our deeds. Atheism, which rejects this majestic fact, is not the knowledge that God does not exist, but the wish that He did not, in order that one could sin without reproach or exalt one's ego without challenge. The pillars upon which atheism mounts are sensuality and pride. An atheist may be moral in the popular acceptance of the term, but he is not humble. As Franz Werfel says, "The atheist primarily and always betrays his own psychology when he thinks he is unveiling the mystery; and his denial unwittingly becomes the proof of God by confirming, against his own troubled will, the tremendous and vital importance of the metaphysical content of perception."
As atheism offers no escape from God, neither does darkness, whether it be the dark of a cave or of our own unconsciousness. We may drive God out of our minds, argue against Him, but we know that if He did not exist, we should be stupid indeed for spending our energy fighting against the non existence. "Whither can I go to hide from Thy Face?" implies that someone is an escapist: He would never seek to fly from a God Who approved his way of thinking, living, and acting. Such a God would be according to man's own image and likeness and therefore something to be embraced.
If we fly from God, it is because His Goodness is our reproach and because union with Him demands disunion and divorce from evil. We cannot long stand a God Who looks into our soul and sees its ugliness without falling to our knees; even the flight from Him witnesses to our need of beauty, our love of the Beautiful. As light reveals all things and yet is not a part of that upon which it shines, so do God's Powers, Wisdom, and Love suffuse us, for in Him we live and move and have our being. We know Him, but few want to be known by Him. We love created things because He put some of His love in them; otherwise they could not be lovable. Yet few want to love Him, because He loves too much. He wants us to be perfect, and we do not want to be perfect, we are driven back to it in our discontent with the mediocre, our weariness of the ordinary. God is all-wise, therefore our condition is revealed; God is ever-present, therefore our hidden sins are seen. There is no escape from God.
Yet ever since the days of Adam, humanity has been hiding from God and saying, "God is hard to find." The truth is that, in each heart, there is a secret garden that God made uniquely for Himself. That garden is locked like a safety deposit vault: It has two keys. God has one key, hence the soul cannot let in anyone else but God. The human heart has the other key; hence not even God can get in without man's consent. When the two keys of God's Love and human liberty, of Divine Vocation and human response, meet, then Paradise returns to a human heart. God is always at that Garden Gate with His key.
We pretend to look for our key, to have mislaid it, to have given up the search; but all the while it is in our hand, if we would only see it. The reason we are not as happy as saints is because we do not wish to be saints.
BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN ( 1895 to 1979 )
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Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
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