5 The Quest for God

Let’s back up a bit.

The recap I documented on the peculiarities of religions and just recounted to you in Gods from A to Z took place one morning after Kathleen was off to parochial school and Richard to work. I was catching a breather, which turned into taking stock of my progress in my comparative religion endeavor.

Take note here, thoughtful reader, it might not show, but I was thoroughly shaken at this point by my prolonged sojourn in the land of comparative religions, the demands of the selection process itself, and by my brush with despair (in reality, an episode of spiritual warfare—I’ll explain later).

Consequently, I want you to know that I do not recommend an exhaustive study of comparative religions to anyone. Although, as a background for living, my accumulated knowledge does help put into context the plethora of zany ideas that the age of communication has set loose like a rain of meteors in the latter half of the 20th century. Still, I stick to my conviction. In my estimation, only a person without a clue to her name (An airhead debutante, maybe?) would ever make such a mistake as to wade into that much and that kind of material on her own.

It became extremely clear to me during that sojourn that I could have easily become lost in the clever, seductive, and lofty reasoning interwoven in those thousands of pages that I had read in my study. As it was, there came a moment when I had to either rein myself in or be overcome. Thankfully, I pulled back, and did so well-pleased with the crisp derivative list of grounding observations that evolved from my effort and that I shared with you in Chapter 4. The list gave me closure. The list set me free.

When the moment of freedom finally came and I sat there completed list in hand, the idea of a quest for the Christian God suddenly became quite inviting. The thing about a quest is that it is an adventure. I must have some of the famous early American pioneering spirit in me because the idea of new territory to explore and map never has failed to engage me and at this point swept me on.

At first I thought the pursuit would be easy. Well, it's not really.

You see, to pursue the Christian God one must pursue the Judeo-Christian God—remember, the one shared by Jew and Christian, sort of. And the quest for God in this joint territory is complicated. Not that you or I would automatically know that particular fact to be true. We see the Jewish Temple, we see the institutionalized Christian Church, the denominations, and we assume, yes, assume that there is one and only one official way to pursue God for either, give or take a few differences and idiosyncrasies (to put it mildly) in the doctrines of each denomination or group. And certainly any one group or denomination is going to insist that the way is their way, so there you are, my friends, stuck with this one-take-on-faith idea that’s like a rubber band too small for its task. In fact, Jews and Christians both find it a real strain to discuss their jointly-held God.

Yet the Jewish Temple and the institutionalized Christian Church both were born out of the practice of believers assembling for corporal worship, Jews in tents and Christians gathering in homes. And it is only with the passage of time that the sense and practice of an external (to one’s heart, that is) route (that being the temple or the church proper) has become the only legitimate portal to God and, intentionally or not, suppressed all other thinking. Now, the temple or denominational church can be a real source and refuge for believers, and the primary hub of God-ordained fellowship, but it is not the source of our relationship with God.

God is the source of our relationship with Him.

My young Christian-born self of twenty-five years ago had already found this truth to be so. I had been from one mainstream Christian denomination to another and another and none could make that personal relationship with God happen for me. If it were going to happen at all, I divined it would be something that God made happen . . . between the two of us.

Only then could I aspire to truly fellowship with other believers and until then the quest for God was up to Him and me.

To be continued . . .