Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter
We search for things all the time. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked for my glasses only to find them on the top of my head! Sometimes I’ll think something is lost only to discover it was right where it was supposed to be all along. Things have a tendency to “hide in plain sight” at times, too. The ultimate search conducted by the human heart is the quest for God. Miraculously, this quest begins not with lostness but with foundness. The God who may seem unknown is actually known intimately by the human soul and that soul is intimately known and loved by its Creator. In reality, God is the Seeker, God pursues us. Wondrously, any human seeker is actually perpetually found, her search swallowed up in the vastness of God’s relentless pursuit of her. We wrongly perceive the Divine as the object of our seeking, but God cannot be objectified. God is the Seeker; we are the sought. It’s a marvelous irony that in our unknowing is the deepest and most intimate knowing. Today, let us awaken more and more in our God in whom we discover ourselves found.
In today’s first reading, the Apostle Paul gives a speech to the people of Athens. Their search for the divine was so earnest that they even erected an altar to an “Unknown God” just to cover their bases. They, like many people search for God as if God is an unknown, unidentified object “out there” somewhere. Throughout all the world’s religions, humans search for the divine, looking beyond themselves, attempting to identify, define, and describe who God is and what God does. Christianity is different. God reveals through Christ that it is God who searches for us; God reveals Godself to us, God pursues us. St. Paul tells the Athenians that the One they seek is their Creator, the One who gives them life and breath and the entire created order. This One desires that people would seek God back, would respond to their Creator’s pursuit. How ironic that people search for the divine when the One who created them and knows them more intimately than they know themselves has been right there all along. And not only that but woven into their souls. “In him we live and move and have our being,” Paul declares, using the words of secular poets to underscore his point that the abstractness of the divine is personified through Christ in the Triune God. We actually find our existence in God, not apart from God. God knit the desire for God into our very being, so much so that we “grope” for God (I love this imagery that Paul uses in our text!). Far from groping desperately in the dark, however, we need only allow Christ the Light to illuminate our search such that we awaken to our foundness.
What about you, what about me? Are we still searching for the God whom we think we have yet to know? If so, let us today ask the God who pursues, seeks, and finds to come fully into our hearts and minds. We sing in a beloved hymn, “Amazing grace how sweet the sound . . . I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” Perhaps today we can view our lostness as groping in the dark for something that has been right here for us all along, just like those glasses that I found on top of my head. Perhaps today we can awaken to our foundness and allow the Seeker to reveal more and more of the fullness of divine love to us today. Let us take up our position in him and then move and find our being there. And then, like the Apostle Paul, let us take this simple message to all those around us. A hurting world needs to know that for each of us, it is “In him that we live and move and have our being.” We’ve already arrived; we’re already found; we’re eternally, unconditionally loved.
Elizabeth Wourms