“The water in the stream may have changed many times, but the reflection of the moon and the stars remains the same.”

Rumi

One of the joys of being an Interfaith Minister is being able to see the way that God, the Divine, penetrates this world. All around us, you can see Divinity at work. Visiting people in the hospital and sitting beside them on their deathbeds in their homes, I’ve seen the essence of life dancing, ebbing, and flowing inside of people at their worst, and that has moved me many times to a deeper sense of holiness and calling in this world. One of the things that I always find myself meditating on is the act of finding God. What does that mean? Are we playing a divine version of hide-and-seek? Has Divinity somehow left me, or have I abandoned it?

I ‘ve come to see, through my experience, that the Divine is shown through the way we live and act here on earth. What does that mean? Well, first think about what God, or the Divine, or Holiness, or even just being a good person means to you. How does that person act? How do they move through the world? How does it effect the world? What does this person inspire in you?

This is what it means to connect with, or “find God.” Every religious tradition has some way of trying to explain this through their personal imagery, and non-religious people often show it more through their actions than their words. This bigger-ness, this connection to this loving undercurrent of life, is what all of our hearts long for in some way. The aim of spirituality is to become one with this force in each moment of our lives–therefore becoming wholesome, loving, compassionate people. In this way, we can see the Divine in the tears of the grieving, hear it in the laugh of a newborn baby, smell it in the food cooked for us by the family who had little to share but enough love to offer the little food they possessed.

So, how does one connect with God, the Divine, Life & Love itself? We look within–within the chambers of our hearts and the whispers we hear in our souls. There is the place where we find ourselves and the undercurrent that holds us so closely to one another that we become one with all of creation. This is where life flows from, and the source that enables life to bloom.