Acts 17:27 Meaning That They Should Seek the Lord

The Lord that Paul set before the Athenians is not a being off in the sky but your own human imagination, the God you have never recognized as God. That is why the search is a matter of feeling rather than travel. You do not walk toward him; you feel after him, because he is the very power by which you feel anything at all.

To feel after him is to feel the wish already fulfilled, to take up the sensation of the thing you want as though it were yours now. Felt as real, a state becomes real, for the spirit that animates you and your imagination are one and the same. He is not far from any of us because he is nearer than breathing, the awareness looking out through your eyes this moment. The seeking ends the instant you stop looking outward and know that the seeker is the sought.

Fiṭra: the inborn leaning toward God Every person is born already tilted this way. That tilt explains why people who were never taught anything still go looking, and why the looking shows up in every country and every century. The pull comes first, and the searching is what that pull looks like from the inside.

Ṭalab: the seeking itself Attar made the search the first stage of the road, long before any arrival. Someone who wants and has not found usually thinks they are failing, since nothing has happened yet. The wanting is already the start, and it keeps a person pointed the right way while everything is still unclear.

Ilāh al-muʿtaqad: the God as each person pictures him Ibn Arabi said the God anyone reaches for is the one their own mind has drawn. The picture comes from what a person was told, what they have suffered, and how much they can hold. Reaching out means reaching toward that picture, and the search slowly stretches it as the person goes.

He is hidden by the brightness of his own showing: the obvious gets missed Al-Ghazali put it that way in the Niche of Lights. Anything constant and everywhere stops registering, the same way people forget about the air until someone mentions it. So a person can spend years feeling around in the dark for what has been in plain sight the whole time.

Whoever comes to me walking, I come to him running: the first move is answered A saying the Prophet passed on from God, about how little it takes. Someone who suspects they are alone in this will keep score of their own effort and find it thin. The effort is met from the other side, and met faster and larger than it was offered.

We are nearer to him than his jugular vein: the closeness is already there A line from the Quran that Sufis come back to constantly. Searching usually assumes a gap, so a person pictures God far off and themselves calling across empty space. The closeness described is nearer than family or friends, so the search becomes waking up to what was already the case.

Groping is the honest description of most searching: hands stretched out in the dark for something that is not at any distance. Distance is manufactured by the search itself, since every reaching assumes a there and a later, and both are inventions of the mind.

Still, the groping has its use. A man must exhaust his running before he can be still, and when the reaching finally collapses from tiredness, what he was reaching for is found in the place he never looked, in the one who was doing all the reaching.