Spirituality - Thoughts

Finding gGod

by Mark Fairchild,

© Mark Fairchild, 2024

What I have discovered is that we cannot find gGod by pursuing gGod. Just as we cannot satiate our hunger by eating, not in any lasting way. We look for food, prepare it, eat it, eliminate it, and go about our day. If we are looking for satiety, we eat and then . . . we will still be hungry again. If, however, we are looking for gGod, we worship . . . and then we go about gGod's work in our everyday life.

By pursuing gGod we do seem to find gGod and then we think we have him, only to find out that we do not. gGod is not something we can possess, any more than we can satiate hunger. However, the more we pursue gGod find him, and lose him, if we keep on trying to find Him the more He begins to possess us!

This might indicate that gGod is an illusion created by us, but I doubt it, and yet there is also truth to that. We live in a world where we create reality by looking for it. True; we are fulfilling a function that we did not create, it is who we are created to be -- that sort of creature. We are creatures that create reality.

But who or what are we created by? By a love of the realities we are made to create, by the gGod that created us; a paradox that is gGod in us; a gGod who is there, who exists; who possesses us from the very start.

Life is a place where we learn to create realities of all sorts; but the most important reality we create is that of gGod. Not the gGodthat preexists us, but the gGod that we try to find, who in the end finds us when we are developed enough to recognize Him.

Something, or someone, created a Universe in which we create reality. It then becomes important to understand the rules of this process:

• ‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” [Matthew 7:12].  Imagine what you would want them to do to you, and that becomes the reality you seek; How? By embracing it the only way you can; by doing to (for & with) others. What this amounts to is “loving your neighbor as yourself.
  

• In everything that ultimately matters that is how it comes into being: we create it; “love the Lord your gGod with all your heart, and  with all your soul, and with all your mind” [Matthew 22:37] and it will be so.
  
  

• So we can have gGod, but only if we will it, and Jesus gave us many ways to pursue that. There is a catch, however; it has to truly matter. Wealth and food and such things, by their very nature, must perish. Not so with love and gGod.
  
  

• I would add that this is a very unique kind of creation because gGod is Love; not a thing, but a condition, not a noun but an adjective.. We are creating not the reality of a noun (a person, place, or thing), but the reality of an adjective. It can be hard to grasp because gGod created everything, So how can an adjective create a noun? It is alien to our way of thinking.

• Yet, if you pursue it, it makes sense. However matter was created, it had to preexist matter; a quandary. Luckily, as it happens, matter is not material in its very primary essence it is energetic; it is composed of energy. (E = mc2 ) So don't get hung up on the idea that a 'being' created everything, in the way we tend to think of "things"; energy is more like a principle than a thing. A principle that we know as gGod.

• Moreover, we do not create things, out of nothing, but we do create meaning out of (seemingly) nothing: this is a thing I love, vs this is a thing I hate; this is beautiful vs this is ugly; even this is green vs this is blue (my wife was certain that green lights were actually blue—it is a thing!)

• gGod theologians consider, or ever did consider, gGod to "be" a physical "thing". In Guide for the Perplexed: Part I: Chapter I by Moses ben Maimon, aka Maimonides, when at the very start of the chapter, he contrasts the terms ẓelem (essence) and toär (form), etc.

• Are we then creating gGod in our image? To some degree, perhaps. Our minds want to describe a noun as a physical thing; it is in the nature of our everyday experience. We do not invoke gGod and He magically appears before us, like some genie out of a bottle. We see and embrace gGod and He appears to us, in a reality and in a form we can imagine. Every painting of Jesus is as the painter imagines Him, and that is enough. What we see in this life is always changing, just as the world is always changing; just as reality is always changing.

• One problem is that we view ourselves as things, as animals. We are, however, spirits; things" that have been searched for but never been found in the material world. We were created in an immaterial form, which reflects our immaterial creator. Yet connected to the material world via our immaterial souls.
  
  gGod's nature is not of this world, just related to it. I think this Is true for EVERYBODY. We live in this world, but we are not of this world. [John 17:1] gGod knows people. Some are better than others, but not everyone is either absolutely good or absolutely evil. If Jesus remains with us, always. [Matthew 28:19-20] as we live in a world of sin, and will find his “god” to be the god of sin . . . i.e. Satan. I do not believe gGod will abandon us to that if we want and try to be good; I find Purgatory, or something like it, to be a hopeful thing then—a place where we can re-imagine Heaven to be the place we ought to hope it to be and can still hope for that, rather than a place where we find ourselves for eternity. Simply put, gGod is merciful, we just need try to earnestly. Just keep seeking gGod, even after death, and you will eventually find Him. When you do, He will possess you.
  
  

• In all our religions we all seek ultimate realities that are good, and that will not change. We might just find that, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” [John 14:2]

• Everyone is looking for gGod because everyone was created by Him and is drawn back to Him; be that the gGod of the Jews, Christians, or Muslims, or the gGod of the Hindus (called Īśvara in the Upanishads, as well as Love or the Lord of Love), and buddhatā (Sanskrit) and busshō (among Japanese Buddhists), etc.
  
  Some people see that as being a religious paradigm, some see it as being an artistic paradigm, others see it as being a scientific paradigm, and so on, each using their own terminology.
  
  

As for us (Christians) we need to allow gGod to work His way with His creatures. IF we (I happen to be an Episcopalian, an artist, and a scientist) truly worship gGod in the Episcopal Church, THEN I do not need to drag people into my church, little less hold them here to talk with me. They do not need to see how it is all a unified whole right now, or rather if they do, then they will find all the pieces in their own time. Hopefully, if we are true to our spiritual callings, and they are true to theirs, then someday they will see that and want to find their way to us—or to wherever they see God.

I, however, do want to see it all as a unified whole; and more importantly, so does gGod [Ephesians 2:11-22] (whosoever or whatsoever, in whatever manner the true gGod manifests to you). We need only be the people gGod has led us to be, as people, created by gGod, rather than as 'church-goers,' who worship “sufficiently”, and they will sense that there is something in us that they are looking for. Then, sooner or later, they will want to come to better understand it. If at any time they want to talk about it in “church terminology,” then fine; meanwhile, we just need to be interested in them, our neighbors, for who and what they are.

That is how you love your neighbor, and that is how you love your gGod with all your heart, and with all your soul.

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Notes:

→ I use "gGod" rather than "God" to emphasize that god is found in all religions. "God" might be actually referring to the God in Christian scripture, but conceptually forbidding God to do his will in the scripture of other religions where He is not capitalized. At times we read "God" and perceive the God in our minds, which can very often (usually?) refer to just what is in our minds, the God of our misinterpretations, of our misconceptions, rather than the God that is actually out there in reality ...  the "one true God".

In the future, I will dispense with this convention and simply spell the word "God" but my remarks here should be understood to apply there too. We must never make the mistake that what we understand to be true is beyond questioning -- actually True -- lest we be like those who burned witches and heretics in our all too regrettable past, thus making a sham of the word of God in the process!