Where is God in Your Life and How Do You Experience Him?
Each person could have a different answer to those questions and they may change over a lifetime — as they did in mine. Here is a brief account of my experience and how I view it today.
Linda K Saxton, OCDS
In childhood, my image of God was shaped by Bible stories — an imposing figure in the clouds, powerful and distant. In part, I formed this image of God from the picture to the left found in a family book of Bible Stories. Many years later it was suggested that it was not of God, but rather the prophet Elijah, who was founder of the Carmelites, carried up to heaven in a chariot of fire. Regardless, my early sense of God was marked more by awe, distance, and fear than by loving communion.
As a young adult in the 1970s, I encountered what I believed to be God during a group meditation. I experienced radiant warmth, light, and a profound sense of home within the core of my being, my soul. Over the next fifteen years, I devoted myself to a contemplative practice and life founded in Eastern Spirituality. My understanding of God during that time was expansive but impersonal — more like a universal consciousness than a relational presence.
I also learned and partook in Native American Spirituality and its beliefs including the spiritual nature of earth, air, water, and fire; animal spirits; and the sacred practices of sweat lodges, vision quests, sun dances, and the ceremonial smoking of the sacred pipe. It was all very natural to me.
During those years I sincerely lived with discipline and devotion to my spiritual practices and was challenged to grow in my personal and professional life. I was searching deeply, unceasingly with minimal distraction from the world not because I was engaged in it but where I was focused. Yet something essential was missing: I did not yet know God as someone who loved me personally.
Decades later, during a period of emotional healing, I encountered Jesus Christ in a new way. What began as curiosity became relationship. I came to know God not as distant or impersonal but as One who entered human life fully and loved me within it. I found God speaking directly to me through scripture, His Son, and through impassioned believers, many who were converts to the Catholic faith.
In time, I found myself walking into a Catholic church, where I experienced a quiet, steady sense of God’s presence. I did not yet understand the Eucharist, but I sensed that something — or rather Someone — was truly there and loving me. Though I hesitated at first, the desire to deepen that relationship led me eventually to begin the conversion process to Catholicism.
I was confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church in 2019 at the age of 68.
Through the sacraments, Scripture, and the living tradition of the Church, my understanding of God became more embodied and relational. What I once sought through effort and interior practice, I began to receive through Grace. Catholic spirituality gave structure and depth to a spiritual relationship that had once felt abstract.
Before my conversion, while meditating before the statue to the right of St. Therese of Lisieux, a nun of the Carmelite order, I felt a special connection that inspired me to read her autobiography, Story of a Soul. Something in it called to me. I went on to read other Carmelite writings by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross founders of a reformed branch known as the Discalced Carmelites. I discerned a calling to the Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites who live contemplative lives in the world in contrast to a reclusive monastic life like the nuns and friars of the order. I joined the Catholic Church to follow that calling.
Looking back, I do not regret the years of searching. They formed my capacity for silence and awareness and an openness and respect for other traditions. But, they were preparation, not fulfillment. Fulfillment came in discovering that the sacred Presence I had long sought was not impersonal consciousness of the Eastern Spiritual traditions but the living, relational Christ - aware of me, loving me, and inviting me into deeper intimacy through the Eucharist and Prayer.
Wherever you are in your own spiritual search — whether questioning, practicing, doubting, believing, healing, or beginning again — know this:
God is already here.
You do not have to become spiritually advanced to find Him.
You only need to be willing to be found.