James 4:8: “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.”

“Before we search for God, God is searching for us.”  Abraham Heschel

I find this quote by Abraham Heschel posted all over the Abbey.  Odd that a Catholic Monastery will put up a quotation from a Jewish theologian for a Protestant Hebrew teacher to read.  Go figure.

In a sense Heschel’s quote seems to be in contradiction to James 4:8.  I mean it appears from James 4:8 that we are in search for God and if we are searching for him then God will begin the search for us. There is a story in the Talmud that might answer this dilemma.   A king and his son had a dispute and it was so bitter that the son left his home to live in another kingdom.  After some time the king, this father, sent a messenger to his son saying: “Come home.”  The son sent the messenger back to his father with the message, “That is too far for me to come.”   The king, this father sent another message to his son saying: “Then come as far as you can and I will meet you.”

You see many of us just don’t want to be found by God.  We are too busy with our lives here on earth to even be aware of the fact that God is searching for us. But when we draw near to God, and we begin searching for God we discover that He has been searching for us all along.

There is another story in the Talmud about a rabbi who was with his students when he heard a child crying behind some boxes.  He went and investigated and found a small child hidden behind the boxes crying her heart out.  The rabbi asked what was wrong and she said she was playing hide and seek with her friends but: “No one came to find me.”   The rabbi turned to his disciples and said; “In that child’s voice I hear the cry of the Master of the Universe.”

In Deuteronomy 4:29 we learn that “If you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul.”  As I search for God’s heart during this time of silence I find I can only go so far, but I have discovered that if I reach out for him as far as I can reach, he will meet me.  We must, however, take the first steps.  We must first want to be found by God. Notice the passage says we must search with all our soul.  Our soul is that part of us that expresses our desires.  We desire many things but a like a wife she will not allow herself to become intimate with her husband unless she knows that her husband desires her above any other woman.

So too with God, He will not become intimate with us unless we desire Him above any other God.  To seek an intimacy with God when we are lusting after other Gods puts God on the level of a mistress or concubine.  God does not want to be our mistress, He wants to be our wife, the only God in our life.  Only then will He allow Himself to become intimate with us. Only when we desire Him the most.

So how do we desire God more than any other?   The answer is found in Psalms 37:4: “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”   First step to desiring God which will lead to an intimacy with God is to delight yourself in Him.  The word delight in Hebrew is ‘anag which means to be delicate and dainty.  It comes from a Persian word for being amorous.  A woman becomes amorous when she makes herself desirable.  If she is going on a date and wanting to impress the young man, she spend the afternoon going to the beauty parlor getting her hair done, getting a facial.  She will choose her best and most flattering dress, in short she will do everything she can to make herself beautiful for the young man.  She will appear to him to be very feminine, a delicate and dainty creature that appeals to the male instinct to protect and shelter.  Such behavior declares to the young man that she is desirous to be intimate with him.  Of course if she goes through all that trouble and he was attracted to her enough in the first place to even ask her out he will give her the desire of her heart which is to be intimate with Him.

So how do we become intimate with God, we make ourselves as attractive as we can.  We clean up our act, we rid ourselves of other gods, we put on the garment of praise and we let Him know that we want only Him and Him alone.  You see the word for desire is sha’al which means a request or petition but a request or petition is expressing a desire. This is not just any request but a request from the heart.

I have journeyed down to the Abbey to ‘anag to make myself beautiful before God so I could sha’al give him a request. The thing is that after having gone through this period of cleansing and purging I find my initial request to be meaningless and I desire only one thing, which is I have only one sha’al request and that is to just be intimate with Him.  So I begin my search for intimacy with God only to discover as Abraham Heschel said, to find that God was searching for an intimacy with me.  As Gary Paxton, the guy who co-wrote the Monster Mash wrote after he found Jesus: “He was there all the time, waiting patiently in line.”