We need to experience God

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
October 14, 2016

IS it possible to experience God, to feel his presence, to know his will and to participate in his own life? To all these questions, the answer is a loud yes.

Not only is it possible, but also, first of all, it is God’s will. Besides, he has endowed us with the power that would enable us to achieve these feats.

God as our Creator and Father always intervenes in our life. He is never away from us even if we fall into the state of sin. We only lose him definitively in hell. But in our whole earthly sojourn, he is in us, right deep in the core of our existence.

That’s because he is the giver and maintainer of our existence. For as long as we exist, God is in us. Our existence does not depend on our biological constitution alone, nor on food and air and health only. Even before these things become indispensable to us, it is God who gives and keeps our existence.

And since we have been made in his image and likeness, he links with us through our intelligence and will, through our thinking and loving, and thus he comes to us as objects of our innate desire for truth, goodness and beauty.

That’s why we have to be most careful in the exercise of our spiritual faculties – how we are thinking, judging, reasoning, loving, etc. These human operations have to be firmly grounded on God, and not just made to be mainly dominated by the twists and turns of our bodily and natural conditions.

Our thinking and willing, our knowing and loving should be properly engaged and not allowed to just drift anywhere, and especially when they are given only at the instance of our instincts, emotions and passions. They have to be properly inspired and directed.

The need to experience God has become an urgent necessity these days because the spiritual and moral health of our life, taken individually and collectively, depends on this fact and on no other.

Pope Emeritus Benedict emphasized this point sometime ago. In an address to some lay faithful, he said the following:

“How do we reawaken the question of God so that it becomes the fundamental question?...The question of God is reawakened in meeting those who have a living relationship with the Lord. God is known through men and women who know him. The way to him passes, in a concrete way, through those who have met him.”

This is just but natural. God is not just an idea, a theory, a philosophical or theological term. Christ is not just a historical figure nor an object of curiosity. God is alive. In fact, he is the very foundation of reality and of life itself. It’s not in his character to stay away from us or to hide from us or to play hard to get.

Thus, the Pope Emeritus said that God should be the central point of reference in our thinking and acting. He warned that ignoring God will harm our humanity. “A mentality that rejects every reference to the transcendent has shown itself to be incapable of preserving the human,” he said.

“The spread of this mentality has generated the crisis that we are experiencing today, which is a crisis of meaning and of values before it is an economic and social crisis,” he added. How true!

God actually engages us every moment of our life. This is what providence is all about. We have to learn how to correspond to that continual divine governance, by learning how to pray, how to know and follow his will, how to offer whatever we are doing to him, how to live in his presence all the time, how what we are doing at the moment fits in his plan, etc.

For this we need to study well the doctrine of our faith, to have recourse to the sacraments, to develop the virtues, and to commit ourselves to a certain plan of continuing piety so that whatever may be the circumstances of our life, we can manage to be with him always.

To live with God is not an impossibility. Nor is it meant only to some gifted if not strange people. It is for all, though we need to help one another, since to achieve that condition involves a lifelong process with endless stages, aspects and possibilities.