Finding God Where We Are

Arthur Clutton-Brock visits me this morning with this message:

“Christ has been misunderstood by those who think of Him as offering a consolation prize.  He told them how to keep the fire living in the grate; told them that the fire itself was of the same nature with the stars.  He promised them a passion freed from its cage; seeing it not a danger to the soul but the soul itself, passionate for that which is not itself, the soul become all a lover and finding everywhere the scent and beauty, the allurement, of that which it loves.  He knew the error of those philosophers who see nothing between their own lonely selves and God in an infinite distance; for Him man is not a lonely spirit on the earth, lonely in his private search for a far distant God.  God is to be found and seen, not through an illimitable vacancy between Himself and the spirit of man, but in and through all things that stir men to love.  He is to be seen in the light of a cottage window as well as in the sun or the stars.

Only those who know this escape from the dullness and routine of life.  Blake has told us that Satan is the god of things that are not, “the lost traveller’s dream under the hill.”  He is the god of the rainbow in the next field but one, in seeking whom men miss the true God in the meadow where they stand….Christ tells us to value men and things for their own sake; we must have a passion for men if we are to have one for God.  ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these little ones, ye have done it unto me.’  It is not only of conduct that these words are true.  If we are to understand Christianity, we must extend them and say—Inasmuch as ye have seen one of these little ones, ye have seen me; and Inasmuch as ye have understood one of these little ones, ye have understood me.  God is revealed to us in the known, not hidden in the unknown; and we have to find Him were we are.”