Finding God away from worldly tension

WHAT lies deepest in the heart of man, in all that he does and in the manner of his thinking, is his striving to discover meaning, to escape from the absurd. The mind of man is in search of meaning, his heart is in search of happiness, a happiness which will be complete and unending. We are restless, as SI Augustine says, until our hearts rest in Him is truth and goodness, the explanation of all things, the true object of our loving.
That tension between whether we can know God or whether we cannot know Him was expressed by St Augustine when he said it is far better to love God than to know Him. It is difficult to love someone you do not know. But knowledge of God and love of God feed each other, as it were. If you try to love Him you come to know Him. As you gel to know Him, you love Him more.
We talk of knowing about God, whereas the point is to know God. We want to know God, that is why there must be prayer in our lives. It is only in the experience of praying that we become aware not only that we seek God, but that God is always seeking us.
That realisation can come in all sorts of ways. Often we come closest to Him when we experience weakness and suffering. God can speak to us when we are most desolate. Our search often begins when tragedy befalls us. We then begin to look.
We are slow to understand that God is searching for us, because we are deaf and blind. Our modern civilisation with its emphasis on scientific and technological achievement is in danger of making us less and less receptive to God, and so less inclined to listen and look. But when science and human skill fail us and we feel helpless and weak, that can be a golden moment. We are no longer self-sufficient.
Every individual searches for meaning in life, an explanation of existence and of life's experience. At the same time every individual searches for happiness, for that ecstasy which is to be found in its most intense torm in the experience of love.
The search for meaning and happiness is, in point of fact, a single search. It seeks what lies above, beyond and outside oneself. II reaches to grasp this reality, this transcendence, this Absolute, and — here is the deepest level of truth — this reality and transcendence is found to be a living God, a personal and infinite God.
We all experience this search and hunger to a greater or lesser extent. But this is our human way of describing and experiencing an even more intense search and hunger, God's search and hunger for us. These extracts are from To be a Pilgrim by Cardinal Hume (St Paul Publications; £7.50; paper £4.25).
Picture from The Bible and its Painters by Bruce Bernard (Orbis, £15).