Seeing God everywhere

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

 

WE have to learn how to see God everywhere. This, of course, will require some assiduous training and discipline, but we have our whole life to achieve it, and to be sure, whatever effort and sacrifice would be involved would be all worthwhile.

We need to see God everywhere because that is the ideal condition for us to be in. We are all creatures of God. God as our creator will always be in his creatures because not only is he the giver of our existence but also the maintainer of it. He can never be absent from his creatures, otherwise the latter would simply disappear to nothing.

Thus, we can say that God is actually everywhere. He is around us and also inside us, at our very core. Remember what Psalm 138 says: “Where can I go to escape Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to the heavens, You are there, if I make my bed in Sheol, You are there…” (7-8)

And St. Augustine: “You were within me and I was in the external world and sought you there. And in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you…”

In our case, since as creatures we have been endowed with the capacity to know and to love due to our God-given gifts of intelligence and will, we, unlike the other creatures that are not so gifted, are meant to see, know and love him. For this, he also gives us his grace through the gifts of faith, hope and charity and many other gifts that would help us penetrate and enter into the supernatural reality of God.

We need to see God in everything because otherwise, the only possible thing to happen is to sin, to go against him, against even our own nature, against others. Remember the first sin and the temptation that led to it.

The devil suggested to Eve to look at the forbidden fruit which, as a creation of God, was also good in itself. When she looked at it, she “saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom,” (Gen 3,6) but failed to relate it to God. And so, the fall took place.

We have to find ways to be able to see God in everything—from the usual little and ordinary things that we see and handle everyday to the big things that we get involved in. We have to see to it that we are not just swallowed up by the sensible and intelligible qualities of these items that can give us all sorts of worldly and temporal benefits.

We need to relate them to God in such a way that ideally, the first thing that we should perceive while seeing and handling them is God himself. As said earlier, this will require tremendous training and discipline, since by our nature that, sad to say, is already affected by the consequences of sin, we tend to perceive only the sensible and intelligible qualities of these things without going any further, without referring them to God.

And so we set ourselves up for the fall, in the way of the classic example of the first sin of our first parents!

 

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com