THE MAN IN SEARCH OF GOD

                                          

A brief look at mankind and soon we realize that man is a very religious being. The world is full of religions. They are everywhere, and sometimes there are countless in the same geographical area or culture. Today, if we find a people lost in the Amazon rainforest that has never had contact with other humans, we would certainly see, in its social structure, a religious system. What is the reason for this phenomenon? How can we explain this aspect of human nature: its inclination to the sacred, to the divine?

It is possible that myth and religion were the first manifestations of the human spirit. Probably, at the time when man created one, he gave birth to the other. Although they are very interconnected, myth and religion are different conceptions. The myth is a symbolic narrative, clothed with religiosity, that a culture develops to explain certain things, such as the world and its origin. Religion is a manifestation of worship, based on beliefs that may or may not encompass myths. In it, man seeks to unite with the sacred to achieve comfort and meaning to life.

Religiousness, however, and apparently, is not a recent or acquired human feature throughout history. Its origin goes back to the distant past. Research on the earliest civilizations, such as Sumer and Babylon, shows that they already had a sophisticated religious system. This fact is intriguing, for it is not known how man, immersed in a reality of matter, conceived a structure of concepts relative to a non-concrete, spiritual order. How did primitive man come to the notion of Divinity and the spiritual world?

The psalmist, in his poetry, reflects this aspect of the human soul when he says: "As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?"(Psalm 42: 1-2). But this desire for God does not mean that humanity walks with Him. Rather, the yearning for the Creator reveals its absence in man. It is as if the human being misses God. Man does not see Him, but he knows that God exists beyond this reality. He feels this because he carries within himself, traces and memories of his Creator. Memories of a time when he lived with Him in a context of original reality.

This is exactly the biblical thesis. Man, at the beginning of his creation, lived with his Creator in a state of harmony and fullness. But in a certain moment, making a misuse of your freedom, he separated himself from God. His spirit lost the flow of life it used to receive from its Creator, and for this reason his soul became disoriented by reading a new, merely concrete, reality of existence, and his body lost its initial characteristics, being subjected to a deterioration process which culminates in death (Genesis 2 and 3). Today, man is like the "prodigal son", of whom Jesus Christ spoke: he is in a distant land full of pleasures and sufferings. Some, however, under certain circumstances, remember the Father and decide to return to Him.  

Antônio Maia – M.Div.

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[1] MAIA, Antônio. O Homem Em Busca de Si. amazon.com.br