Encountering God

The gentle nearness of love within us

An abridged version of an article in SPIRITUALITY (July/Aug 2009)
in which
MICHAEL PAUL GALLAGHER SJ writes an imaginary monologue
by KARL RAHNER, in a style more personal than academic.

If I want to help you to find God, I invite you to begin within yourself. Is that surprising? It is the road of many great saints, including Augustine. I am convinced that the road towards God passes through the desires of your heart, simply because those desires are placed there by God.

If you pause and enter into yourself, if you can create a space of quiet self-presence, you get in touch with your longing for something more, even for something infinite. You discover yourself as a kind of mystery, open to infinite horizons of questions and questings. Stillness in itself does not satisfy. Your self-presence on its own is not enough. If you come into yourself, paradoxically, you will discover a need to move out of yourself. Something 'beyond' beckons, it will guide you gradually to divine mystery. I am not saying that this inner journey is easy. Far from it. Many of us can get caught in surface living. We want to escape the costly strangeness of this voyage within. What is deepest in us can easily get suppressed or avoided or neglected. If so, that zone of our self as a place of wonder remains unvisited, and this road to God remains untravelled.

Of course that desire to go beyond yourself is not your own doing. It is God's Spirit at work in the depths of each person. If you start with yourself, I am convinced that you can discover the hidden and creative treasure called grace. It is not a passive treasure but a vibrant source of your growth towards living with love. Ultimately with God's own love.

Let me confess two difficulties of mine. Number one: I am often afraid of God-talk as practised by theologians and preachers. Not only because it can sound predictable and tired, almost like a dead language. More seriously, it can put the cart before the horse. It can lead people to think of God as a Big Object out there beyond us. But God is first and foremost a gentle nearness of love within us, wanting to lead us to the Love that became humanly real for us in Christ. We could be looking in the wrong direction for the wrong god.

And here is my second difficulty: for the vast majority of humanity who have lived on this planet for thousands of years, a fullness of Christian faith was not possible. Even for us now, even for the baptised and believing, I am convinced that our main contact with God is through a quiet grace that guides us through each ordinary day, rather than through explicit moments of religious awareness. What flowers into the fullness of Christian faith has its roots within us long before we come to hear the Word of revelation. Before the Word reaches its climax in the Gospel, the Spirit was already at work in all humanity, all cultures, all religions.

So too in each of us: the Spirit is always leading us towards an encounter with Christ, even though we are unaware of that guidance. In spite of shadows and refusals, you can become more open to love, passionate about truth, courageous in difficulties, generous in attitudes and actions, even surprisingly serene in the face of death itself. These signs are evidence of the Spirit at work in your life. They show that the flow of your river is towards the ocean that is mystery, love. God. And this can be true of many people who cannot make sense of 'religion' as they perceive it. This hidden strand of our spiritual adventure is our normal experience of God. Not just our journey in the direction of God, but God's journey towards us. God's hidden revelation, like an artist secretly shaping all our lives into love.