It’s hard to reconcile the force behind the universe with the divine that engages us on a personal level. How can these be one and the same? I’ve spent much of my adult life puzzling through the confounding teachings of Christianity and I’m just as confused as I ever was. I agree that much of what is delivered shouldn’t be signed for, but then, what are we left with?

I’m not sure any of this is especially profound, but my experience of divinity has not been within the confines of church dogma. I know church doctrine. I say the Apostles Creed on a regular basis. But I’m beginning to learn some things. I feel on the verge of something. I’m still puzzling it all out. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

My experience is that I find God in the very compulsion I feel to find God. I spent several years avoiding faith at all costs. My religion became literature. I read my way out of the confines of a faith that no longer fit. I wrote poetry. I did everything in my power to explore life without any real spiritual grounding.

The problem with this is that if you have been active, as I have in both participation in as well as leading worship in a church setting, you have a hard time not flexing those muscles. Turns out, I need that connection.

And I don’t just mean with this contradictory God. I need to feel connected to all of it. Church, worship, doctrine, people, all of it. But not in the same way I connected previously. I see the flaws in the system, like never before. I have not returned to the womb. I see clearly that if I am to remain active in my chosen faith, there are certain conditions. But that’s a conversation for another day.

I have no empirical proof, but my gut tells me that even when I am not looking, there is a compulsion within me to look again. It may be in fits and starts, but it has always been pervasive. It’s a unifying theme in my life.

But if that were all there was I could dismiss it as a psychological projection of my need for relationships, with persons and myself. I could say this need was a construct of the human brain to explain the unexplainable.

What I can’t shake though is a feeling that as I pursue, I am being pursued. The good or God if you prefer, pursues me to replicate its grace and love among others, not in some evangelical fervor, but in recognition that I am a being of worth as are all other beings. It is, to steal the words from an old hymn, a love that will not let me go.