We Are All Looking for God
...though we call it by a thousand other names.
“It is not surprising that in temptation men so often have the feeling of something absolute which infinitely surpasses them, which they cannot resist. The absolute is indeed there.” — Simone Weil, from “The Implicit Forms of the Love of God”
Here, Simone Wiel is talking about the transcendent. Ecstasy. Union. The same moment of connection that the artist Hank Virgona called “it.” We are all continually on the hunt for “it,” though we're rarely conscious of the fact that it is transcendence we are chasing, for we call it by a thousand other names.
It is the connection of the artist to the universe through his art.
It is the flow state of an athlete in her body.
It is the profound silence that touches the mind of the backcountry hiker.
It Is the high of the heroin addict.
It is the intoxication of lust.
It is the empathic resonance that comes in the ethos of a story well told.
It is the moment of revelation, of understanding, of discovery.
It is the velvet steel of true friendship.
We are constantly groping for the veil between the mundane and the eternal. We are searching for God—everyone, all the time, regardless of what lesser names we may employ. We crave union with the transcendent. We instinctively recognize this as our natural state, as our true home. We come from God and everything that comes from God longs to return to God. It's in us, beckoning, prodding, grasping, like a homing beacon we cannot ever completely shut off, though we definitely do try.
The problem, you see, is that you cannot surrender to the transcendence that is God without surrendering your will to that transcendence as well, as these acts are actually one in the same. So we look for ways to cheat the system, which is to say, to use God without truly loving him. Or else we confuse the conduit for the source, falling into a kind of infatuation with things that reflect God's light, not realizing it's the source we crave. Or else we become ensnared by an imitation of the transcendent, and fall into addiction.
The point is it's always God we are searching for, whatever other name we may use. We come from God, and we long to return to God. How blessed is the human soul who realizes this truth. Her eyes are opened. He no longer needs to distract himself with small delusions. She understands what life is really about.
