I detest looking for things. My general attitude towards locating lost items is not “seek and ye shall find”, but rather “make do without it and hope it will appear eventually”. I have lost my Ipod in my car for a week or so. Two weeks ago, my watch fell off my wrist in my house and I haven't looked for it at all. I just hope it will turn up, washed up to the shores of our clutter by the daily tides of my children and pets. Once, I lost the remote to our VCR for a year or so, until my brother-in-law located it behind the television in the kitchen. During my childhood, my mother often told me, “What do you mean, you can’t find it? Let me look. See, Linda, if it’d had a mouth, it would’ve bitten you.” I just can’t stand looking for things. I don’t enjoy hide-and-seek or scavenger hunts, and Easter egg hunts drive me up the wall.
Due to my severe lack of skills, discipline, and patience in finding lost items, when I do lost something crucial (like my phone, my car keys, or my coffee cup), I panic. My blood pressure rises, I lose my train of thought, and I wildly move around the room, throwing around papers and other clutter in a disorganized fit. I am distraught when I lose the few things I cannot function without in my life. Imagine what I act like when I lose God.
Now, I know I cannot really lose God. God is not a possession to be tracked. God does not have a LoJack, because God is not an object. God is the subject, the Who or What from which the Action stems, the Action which acts upon Us--the Objects of God’s love. We can no more lose God than we can lose the air which we breathe, or the ground on which we stand. I realize the truth of this, but I assure you, there are times in my life when I feel like I’ve lost the air I need to breathe, and the ground underneath my feet. There are times when the blessed balance and grace and gratefulness I find in God seems to have disappeared. There are times when God, the subject of my life, is noticeably absent to my limited perception.
In those moments of loss, I sway between two extremes--overconfident laziness and outright panic. I try to pretend I can just make do without feeling the presence of God, like I never really needed God anyway, like I can just hit the buttons on the VCR without the remote, like I can just handle it myself. That lasts for a while, depending on how individualistic and self-sufficient my ego feels at the moment. Inevitably, the pendulum swings back again, from complacence to desperation. I spin in circles of anxiety that spill over into my work and my relationships. I drive the people in my life crazy; my poor husband says, “You need to settle down!” So, I pray, I read, I listen to spiritual music, I read theology.
Recently, a moment of anxious searching brought me to Peter Rollins, one of my theological super-heroes. In his book, How (Not) to Speak of God, I saw it. As my mom would say, “If it’d had a mouth, it would’ve bitten me.” Rollins writes, “Seeking God is not some provisional activity which precedes the goal of finding, but is itself evidence of having already been found. Rather than desire being fulfilled in the presence of God, religious desire is born there. In short, a true spiritual seeking can be understood as the ultimate sign that one already has that which one seeks, or rather, that one is already grasped by that which one seeks to grasp.” (Rollins 2006) Did you hear that? That I am already grasped by that which I seek to grasp.” The mouth of God just BIT me!
As a child, I learned to sing the hymn, “Seek and ye shall find, Knock and the door will be opened, Ask and you shall receive…” I never forgot the words, but I never understood the meaning. God is not something to locate, to pin down, to lock up for safekeeping. God is not an object to be found; God is the subject from which I stem, from which I act, and from which I seek to find God. Seeking and finding are not separate acts to participate in the mystery of God; they are not cause and effect. Rollins tells us, “Matthew 7.7-8 does not refer to two separate moments but rather to a type of present-continuous tense by which the seeking is the finding, the asking is the receiving and the knocking is the opening.” (Rollins 2006) The moments when we think we lose center, our balance, when we think we lose God, and we begin to seek the Object of God again, are the moments when the Subject of God embraces us and we find ourselves.
Rollins, P. (2006). How (not) to speak of God. (5th ed.) Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press.
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