Many try to find God in other
things and places: in magnificent buildings, in holy people, in a certain
locations. However, we read in 1 Corinthians, 3:16, ‘Don’t you know that you
yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?’ Therefore,
we are to find God in certain places, in holy people but also within us. We
have to first find Him in us, and then outside. Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
had said, on this issue,
‘If we cannot meet God within, in
the very depths of ourselves, our chances of meeting him outside ourselves are
very remote. When Gagarin came back from space and made his remarkable
statement that he never saw God in heaven, one of our priests in Moscow
remarked, ‘If you have not seen him on earth, you will never see him in
heaven.’
This is also true of what I am
speaking about. If we cannot find a contact with God under our own skin, as it
were, then the chances are very slight that even if I meet him face to face, I
will recognize him.
St John Chrysostom said, ‘Find
the door of your heart, you will discover it is the door of the Kingdom of
God.’ So it is inward that we must turn, and not outward – but inward in a very
special way. I am not saying that we must go inward in the way one does in
psychoanalysis or psychology. It is not a journey into my own inwardness, it is
a journey through my own self, in order to emerge from the deepest level of
self into the place where he is, the point at which God and I meet.’[1]
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