Where Do We Find God In This Time?
As I write this, I am in self-quarantine after learning that I am a “high risk” candidate for COVID-19 because of my age and my heart. My doctors didn’t even have to say anything because I already knew what I had to do. Taking care of self? understandable; Playing it safe because of my family and those about whom I care? very much so. But there is also a commitment to a larger community, to those unknown individuals who ought not be jeopardized. Like many of you, the combination of all this at once—the coronavirus, the need for self-care, family, closures and shutdowns, job loss, live streaming, “social distancing,” anxiety—is new territory for me. Perhaps, though, what is even more significant is my effort to search for some kind of understanding of the question I asked above: Where do we find God, in this time? Let’s change the wording a little bit, change the verb “do” to “will” and so ask the question differently: Where will we find God in this time? There is a difference.
Almost 2000 years ago, the Desert Fathers were contemplatives, and they saw things with great clarity; their theology and practices were simple and direct. The Desert Fathers posed the question of where we will find God, that is, where God is to be found in the landscape of a bewildering and frightening world. They would tell us that we will not find God “where God lives.” What does this mean? One thing it means right now is that we will not find God in our churches because our churches (and synagogues and mosques) are physically closed, so we are looking in the wrong places. But here’s the rub: even if the churches were open, that is not where we find God.
Where we will find God is in ourselves. God is present in all of us. And sometimes our search becomes so perplexing and frustrating that we forget that God is also searching for us where we are. Is there a connector here? Yes, there is, and it is prayer. Joan Chittister reminds us constantly that prayer is reaching out to find God who is actually looking for us. Some spiritual writers, for example Henri Nouwen, would say that, because we are God’s beloved, God wants to find us even more than we want to find God. To understand this and make it our own, we have to let God be who God wants to be and to recognize that God wants to be in us. And we have to listen to God and listen for God.
It is the time of Lent, of course, and it is also the frightening time of coronavirus/COVID-19 which brings with it the challenging counsel of withdrawing from many of our communities, including those communities that can nourish our spiritual lives. And this means, that while we can “experience” church with live streaming, we are still alone. Some would say we are “alone together” but we are still alone. And with the challenges of “in this time” come the opportunity to practice solitude, the place in time and space where we can discover—or rediscover—God, and recognize that God is with us always because that is where God wants to be.
Henri Nouwen says it best: “Solitude is…the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter. Solitude is not simply a means to an end. Solitude is its own end…Solitude is the furnace of transformation and without it, we remain victims of our society and entangled in the illusions of the false self.” (from The Way of the Heart).
In the very loud silence that increasingly surrounds us just now, and the prayerful solitude we can make part of it, we can give God our undivided attention; we can listen. And as we listen in the time and place that is our solitude, we can encounter God in our lives as a healer, teacher and guide. Wherever the coronavirus takes us, we will have experienced God’s presence within us, alone and together. We will have found God.
—Father Peter Kountz