So Where is God?

Where is God? Here's a great quote I found by the Pope Benedict XVI, taken from 'Introduction to Christianity', p123:

"[Our God] is not the god of a place, but the God of men: The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is therefore not bound to one spot but is present and powerful wherever man is. God is seen on the plane of I and You, not on the plane of the spatial. He.. thus shows himself to be he who is always near, whose power is boundless. He is not anywhere in particular; he is to be found at any place where man is and where man lets himself be found by him."

God is within us, as the Holy Spirit is Love and the Son is the receiver of Love, the purified and perfected creation, and the Father is the most perfect giver of love. The Holy Trinity is the very life of love itself. If we want to know God then we must look for love, something we can only truly know if we experience it, if we live it.

Yes we can know God by knowing Jesus' history, by seeing what he did, how he sacrificed himself - but to truly grasp his very being is only possible if we experience what he actually was, if we experience love. This is the only way we will identify with the ground of being, with the very essence of God: it is in the simplicity of the love act that we find eternal life. God reaches out from himself as the Son and touches us deep inside, but we only truly receive God as the Holy Spirit, as love. And so it is in our blessed heart that we should look for him.

So, where is God? As Saint Augustine so rightly said: God is indeed closer to us than our own thoughts.

Dawkins, Atheism and Personalism

There is certainly an air of atheism about the past few years. Richard Dawkins has started a religion of people who refuse to see the forest for the trees. It seems easy for some of us to agree with Dawkins that "I see no need for God", "God doesn't know me", "I haven't seen any evidence for a god", yet what nobody wants to first deal with is the even more important question of who this 'I' actually is. Christianity is not about providing an answer to those questions. And the problem is confounded by the fact that there are Christians who *are* trying to answer those very questions. Those questions cannot be answered adequately, not in a way that satisfies everyone.

The answer that Christianity provides is to the question 'Who, in actual fact, am I?'. The answer it provides is 'This is who you can be.' - it is the true meaning of *conversion*. Christian conversion is a conversion in identity, to a person who *can* offer rational answers to those questions. It is an experience that leads to a personal conversion. It is akin to the questions of identity that we are faced with when we fall in love, or when we lose a loved one, when we join a community or are with friends, at a sports game or a national event. I think we must first dig deeply into the questions of our identity before we can ask any fundamental questions that contain that word 'I' or 'me'.

The very question of who God is can only be answered *after* such a conversion, in which we come face to face with a being far greater than the 'I' to which I thought I was so well accustomed. Dawkins represents the very worst of this superficial 'I'. But of course there is always hope, there is always room for a new experience to change the hearts of men. Lets hope that experience can be articulated in the entertaining manner in which Professor Dawkins writes.