As I waited for my CVS prescription, I noticed a shelf of self-help books on sale. Pursuing God was one of the prominent titles. As a practicing pastor for many decades, I encountered, not surprisingly, such a quest many times and in many forms. But before beginning to explore that kind of question with those who sought me out, “seekers,” as they often are called, I would as a matter of course ask them where they were coming from, biographically.
Some had been seekers for a long time. “I’ve tried everything, drugs, sex, meditation, even speaking in tongues,” a young woman once told me, “but I’ve found nothing.” My first impulse was to speak this mystical truth: that encountering Nothingness can be among the most fruitful of spiritual first steps. But I resisted that observation in order to ask such seekers first to tell me their own stories.
At some point along the way, however, sometimes many conversations later, I would find a way to ask: have you ever considered that Down could be Up? Yes, the Liturgy invites us to “lift up our hearts.” But to Whom? Have you ever thought that while you are seeking God above God is seeking you here, down below? Think of the Christmas story as a paradigm: there’s the Lord of heaven and earth seeking humanoids like you and me – in a stable.
You don’t have to ascend some great Chain of Being(s) to some imagined “god” who lives above in the highest heavens, then, you just have to kneel down on God’s good earth, peasant, like me. Go there, on your knees, and adore the Maker of Heaven and Earth, the Ground of Being, disclosing Godself to us in that stable.
And much more. If our conversation would permit this flow, I would find a way to introduce the thought that this kind of vision of God’s presence in the world, down below, on the earth, was championed, sometimes most viscerally, by Martin Luther, with a universal tangibility (not too strong an expression here). For Luther, the God of our universe, the Ultimate Mystery, is present with us not just in Christ, the incarnate Word, but also here and now, in, with, and under all things. Discover, then, that long before you began searching for God, this faithfully present God has been with you, caring for you, renewing you, judging you, trying to get through to you.
While I surely affirm the Eucharistic invitation, then, to lift up our hearts, I would always want to invite any seekers to open their hearts, to see with the eyes of a faith that’s been struggling to be born within, that God is with us at this moment, as we speak, that God is with them at that moment when they caress their spouse, that God is with them when, say, as a teacher they try to get through to a troubled fourth grader, that God is with them when they shout out along the street, with many thousands around the nation, “No more war!” or, just yesterday, when they acclaimed: “No kings! No kings! No kings!”
In a sense, then, the best spiritual counsel I can sometimes offer isn’t to lift up your hearts, but to open your eyes. Pursue the down-to-earth God who’s already pursuing you, here and now.
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