Understanding Our Relationship with God

The Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Adult Catechism for the Catholic Church begins with the chapter on Human Longing. It's about our relationship with God. Our two-sided relationship. How God relates to us. We call Revelation on our side. It's hunger. It's a hunger for the answers of our lives. So often we look in our lives and we seek the answers to meaning.

The meaning of our birth. The meaning of our lives. The meaning of our relationships. The meaning of suffering and evil and death. All of these things we ask, what's the purpose behind these and of our own powers? We don't have the ability to come to an answer, so there's a longing that's built into us.

The 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger describes the human person as a questioning being. He said, we live our entire lives as big questions wherever they are. Big questions. We can assume there must be an answer. God has designed us with questioning hearts.

Saint Augustine, the fourth-century doctor of the Church, put it this way in his great work, The Confessions. He said, "Our hearts are restless. Restless until they rest in you, O God, that you, oh God, are indeed the answer to our longings and our seeking."

When we look for God, oftentimes we can find God in two different pathways. One is the pathway of nature. We visit the Grand Tetons when we're in the Grand Canyon, looking up at this magnificent, work of creation. When we look at the changing of the seasons and the foliage, the bursting colors of the fall. These things that we see, the birth of a child, all of these things that are part of nature. Call us to the question, how does this come about? There must be a great artist. 

Whenever we see a great artwork of Michelangelo's statue or a wonderful painting, we always know behind the painting, behind the artwork. There is a great artist. And so there we can come to the conclusion. There must be a great artist behind all the wonders of nature. 

At the same time, there's another pathway. Saint John Henry Newman, who one day indeed may well be a doctor of the Church,
once said one of the great proofs for the existence of God is our moral conscience, that within each of us, there is within us a voice that says, do this, avoid that. He says we look to where that voice is coming from. It is the voice of God speaking to us about how to live beautifully and goodly. The pathway of nature and the pathway of moral living are two ways that we might come to know that there is a God.

The Catechism teaches us that indeed we can come to a knowledge of God on using just our human reason. We can know that there is a God. The challenge is we don't know who God is for the answer to who God is. We need Revelation. We discover that in the stories of Adam and Abraham and Moses and the patriarchs Jesus, Paul, and Mary. In those stories, we are told who God is, and in our tradition as well, we call Divine Revelation for us.

We live as seekers. We hear that expression in our culture so often today. Often people will say, "I'm spiritual but not religious." There's a great truth in that we all are indeed spiritual beings, embodied spiritual beings that long for the answers to our lives, the answers to both the good and the evil that we find in the world.

For those answers to the biggest questions, we must look to Divine Revelation. But at least we have the hope of a starting place, and that is that we can indeed know that behind all of creation and all of the things that we find in our lives. There is a God who loves us.

The Catechism ends with another line from Saint Augustine, that "God has created each one of us as if there were no others, because of his love for each of us."

And that, my friends, is the beginning and the answer. If we listen to this deeply, sisters and brothers, we seek, we stumble, we hear, we reflect, we pray. We acknowledge that we have to be open to divine revelation. We, indeed, will be renewed.

REFLECT AND RENEW

1. How do you see the longing for meaning manifesting in your own life?

2. In what ways have you experienced or sought a connection with God through nature or moral guidance?

3. How does the concept of divine revelation shape your understanding of God and faith?