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We were created for intimate communion with God. The presence of religion at the heart of every human culture is a sign of that yearning—a yearning often rebelled against and denied—at the core of every human heart.
This yearning shows itself in our “search” for God, a difficult search that demands strong efforts of mind and will, an upright heart, and the witness of others.
Nevertheless, both the outer world and the inner mystery of the human person guide us in our search: the world both by its beautiful order and its decay; our inwardness both by its longing for truth, goodness, beauty, and unity, and by its suffering.
The Church insists not only that we are capable of entering a relationship with God, but that we can know his existence by natural reason. However, because of original sin, this knowledge through reason alone usually happens only with great difficulty.
Why this extraordinary defence of human reason?
The Church knows that communion with God is impossible without revelation and the grace of Christ, but if sin had wholly destroyed God’s image in us, God could never communicate himself to us—nor could believers reach the minds and hearts of non-believers.
Just because sin has not wholly corrupted us, no one can be exempt from the search for God.
However, our search for God would fail if God were not searching for us, for each one of us.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the “divine pedagogy” by which God prepared the human race for the Incarnation of his Son through successive stages of revelation.
As we pray in Eucharistic Prayer IV, “Again and again you offered a covenant to man”—first to various nations as symbolized in the story of Noah, then to one man, Abraham, and his descendants, and finally by God’s formation of Israel and the covenant of Mt. Sinai through the mediation of Moses.
In Israel the one true God manifested himself in human history. History is not “impermeable,” to use a phrase I heard once, but is shot through with the hidden yet radiant presence of the One whose name is “I AM.”
Israel, the one “who struggled with God” (Genesis 32:38), continued to struggle to know and obey its Lord. And God used every bit of this struggle to reveal more of his love, his plan, his promises.
Through his prophets, he called his people to renew their covenant with him and taught them to look forward to a day when he would make a new covenant with them, written on their hearts and open to all nations.
God fulfilled his promises more wonderfully than anyone could have hoped when his only-begotten Son, his eternal Word, became man in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the immaculate daughter of Israel.
In Christ, God himself has come to meet us in our humanity. He has entered into communion with us to bring us back into the communion of his divine life.
Excerpted and adapted from Restoration, September 1994
