Blog # 405 Finding God Today

Blog # 405  Finding God  Today

          Recognizing God's presence in all of creation seems to have been one of the main causes of greatness on the part of holy men and women throughout the history of God's dealings with mankind.  Holy men and women throughout our human history have always recognized God around them and within them in created things, in the love and goodness of friends, in the forgiveness of injury and sin, and in all the natural processes we know and experience. For holy men and women a beautiful sky was not just something we see, but an expression and an example of the beauty of God.  For holy men and women the gifts and love of friends were not just tokens of human friendship and love, but the expression of God's love and friendship as well. In a Christian environment people around us would be loving us and we would be loving them at the command of God as well as in response to any attractiveness we would be finding in one another.

             Surely St. Paul was saying something of this when he wrote to the Colossians (3:17):
"Whatsoever you do in word or in work, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him".  And Jesus was telling us this when He told us to love God above all things, with our whole minds, and with our whole heart, and with all of our strength.  To see God in all things, and in all persons, and in all events of our life, and to  love Him there is a method for gaining  great holiness.

            It seems more difficult for people these days to see God in this way in their lives. It used to be we knew God's love for us in the harvest, in the sunshine, and in the rain, in health and sickness, both because of our immediate experience of depending upon God and in our prayers.  People in the Centuries before our own were far less independent than we are today.  When someone got sick or  when an infection set in, there was no knowledge of penicillin  or other such medicines to help with the cure.  People naturally would turn to God.  Before the days of artificial  insemination and artificial  fertilizers. electricity and machines, the farmer knew full well his dependence upon nature and on God.

         Now we know so much and can do so much about nature and its processes that if something goes wrong or we have some need we tend to go to science, to a machine, or to our fellowman for help and advice rather than to God.  We are in danger of forming a habit of forgetting that nothing exists or is possible without God, that the light of the moon always comes from the sun.

           It is not at all that faithful people today should or need go back some hundred and fifty years in history and cast aside the improvements and advances modern science has made possible for us. Not at all! Rather we should make an effort to realize, as always, nothing exists without God willing it to be so, and if today  we have so much and such a wonderful world, we are being given the opportunity and called upon for greater thanksgiving and response to God's presence and God's love.