In quest of God

Meghana Athreye lives in Aurora with her husband and two children.

I have been on a lifelong quest for God, that wondrous entity which would be the solution of all my problems. I could never describe God, but it did seem that understanding God meant eternal peace, bliss and joy. However, my background really did not do much to clarify the vision of God that I felt deep within the inner core of my heart.

Every description I was given felt borrowed. God was a person in the sky, or a force, or a principle — each definition neat, each one somehow smaller than the longing that produced it. I collected these descriptions the way one collects maps of a country one has never visited, and mistook the growing pile for progress.

At some point the quest itself began to look suspicious. The harder I searched, the more the search resembled a way of postponing the encounter. If God is the solution to all my problems, then as long as I am still questing, I never have to face the possibility that the problems are mine to outgrow rather than to be rescued from.

What remains is quieter than a quest. Not the dramatic finding, but the slow recognition that the awareness doing the seeking was never separate from what it sought. The peace, the bliss, the joy — they were not prizes at the end of the search. They were the texture of the searching itself, once I stopped demanding that it conclude.