How do I get closer to God?

You cannot get closer to God than you presently are.

Jesus says, “I am in my Father, as you are in me, and I am in you” (Jn 14:20).

St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me.” (Gal 2:20).

St. Paul uses variation of “in Christ” and “Christ in you” over 160 times to describe how the believer exists in the very life of Christ

“All of you who have been Baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Gal 3:7).

The desire for a human experience of emotional awareness of God is what created Gnosticism. The Greek “gnosis” is, to know. Gnosticism is not just an early Chritian phenomena, It exists universally in people in the sense of wanting to know God by an experience of God.

St. Maximillian Kolbe, whose universal  feast day in the Catholic Church is today, did what he did in fidelity to Jesus’ teaching of love (agape) in the model of His love for all people, without knowing even whether the Nazi’s at Auschwitz would keep their word when they agreed to him substituting his life for that of a Jewish father of a family—along with thousands of other unknowns in that moment when he made his decision. He just acted in a Christlike Way because it seemed needed at the moment.

On the cross when Jesus forgave His murderers and prayed to the Father to forgive them and even offered God an excuse to forgive them (they know not what they do), he as a  human being  was as blind to the future as Maximilian was, with all human speculation, that what He was doing could make any difference, near zero. And so it is with every Christlike decision in the Christian life and with the entire Christian life in general. We walk, take each Christlike step by grace and faith not by knowledge, the rest is literally beyond calculation or evaluation. God is eternally closer to us than our breath. The issue, indeed perhaps the paramount spiritual disciple of the Christian life, is to be 24/7/365 attentive to His presence. Several of the saints mention that, “All sin begins with inattentiveness to the presence of Jesus, Emmanuel, “God with us.”  But, attentiveness to the presence of God in crisis moments comes after attentiveness to the presence of God in the ordinary moments and conflicts of life. Attentiveness to God is by grace and personal choice a nurtured habit of mind and heart, soul and spirit. Fidelity in little things makes fidelity in greater things possible. It is attentiveness to the presence of Jesus with us all days and all times, that makes the Christlike deed possible at all days and all times. The choice of any moral or immoral act is first made in the mind and then manifest in bodily acts. If the mind is habitually attentive to the presence of Jesus, God, that is the greatest bulwark to the barrage of external unChristlike thoughts, words and deeds that pour down on each person daily from the world in which he or she lives and from the unChristlike words and deeds that rise up from within  a person’s own psyche.

There are an untold number of humanly contrived methods for generating pseudo-emotional mental experiences of divinity, but as Theresa of Avila has noted that even if you go the ninth degree of heaven in your meditation, when you return to your normal consciousness, you must still choose to follow Jesus in your every actions in daily life. In other words, gnosis experiences of the holy do not save. So perhaps it is best to spend our Christian time being attentive to the presence of Jesus who lives in us 24/7/365 and forever and ever, and work hard to live in conformity to that presence which will itself always be in conformity with Jesus in Four Gospel, the “preeminent and definitive revelation” of God and His Way to all Christians and to all humanity. But, will always be something we have to struggle to do, even though He is always present and offering His assistance.

Charlie