To Find God in the World of Today – Precisely in the Chaos, Confusion and Sin.

It is most interesting that the philosopher David Walsh ("After Ideology"  CUA 1990) speaks of three figures who found God in the present day world: Dostoevsky, Camus, Solzhenitsyn and Eric Voegelin: “They rediscovered the power of transcendent Love.” He says that “The big difference… is that they recovered it precisely in response to the crisis of the modern world… the discovery of a living truth in the present… From having been on the defensive for the past five hundred years. Philosophy and Christianity have regained a centrality and authority within the contemporary world that is hardly short of epochal.”

Pope Francis: “Finding God in all things is not an ‘empirical eureka.’ When we desire to encounter God, we would like to verify him immediately by an empirical method. But you cannot meet God this way. God is found in the gentle breeze perceived by Elijah. The senses that find God are the ones St. Ignatius called spiritual senses. Ignatius asks us to open our spiritual sensitivity to encounter God beyond a purely empirical approach. A contemplative attitude is necessary: it is the feeling that you are moving alone the good path of understanding and affection toward things and situations. Profound peace, spiritual consolation, love of God and love of all things in God – this is the sign that you are on this right path.”

Blogger: The point is that you discover God in the exercise of yourself in the service of others. This is an empirical (non-sensible [no pun intended] experience of God since you are ontologically real in your very persona as image of God. And when you go out of yourself in any way  for another to serve and forget self, that experience of self-transcendence is necessarily accompanied by a consciousness of the Truth, the Good as Universal, because you are imaging the living Christ taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan. I would refer you  to Robert Barron's "The Priority of Christ" (2007 Brazos Press Publiction) for a profound and learned development of this. It is one with Joseph Ratzinger's "theological espistemology" as in his "Behold the Pierced One" (Ignatius [1986] 26-27).