Man is without God. To his mind, God, if He is at all, is an absentee. He examines the treasures around him, studies them, grasps them, and speculates of the Creator as one who may be or may not be. Generally, indeed, he speculates not at all. In his conception God is remote — and it is idle to waste time in searching Him.
Is there a God? Let him hear the Savior reply: "Seek purity of heart, and you shall find Me."
God is nigh — this is wonderfully manifest. Let them know that they need not the accomplishment or change out of themselves. There is a word with us, and it is as follows: "Lo! I am with you always." To the unbeliever, a mere word and no more. But to the initiated — a means of finding forever and everywhere the brightness of the divine glory.
✦ The Deeper Condition
Bowen does not describe the person without God as someone in open rebellion — not a shaking fist at the sky. He describes something quieter and more ordinary: a soul for whom God has simply become remote. An absentee. Not worth the search. The person who speculates not at all — that is the deeper condition. The atheist at least has God on his mind. The person who simply does not bother — who turns to the treasures around him and finds them sufficient — that is the ordinary human condition without purity of heart.
And then Jesus turns the entire search around. You are looking in the wrong direction. You are examining creation, speculating about a distant Creator, waiting for sufficient intellectual evidence to arrive from somewhere beyond the horizon. Seek purity of heart — and you shall find Me. Not out there. Not after sufficient investigation. Here. Now. In the purified interior. The search was never meant to be horizontal. It was always meant to go inward — and upward. 🙏
"Seek purity of heart, and you shall find Me."
George Bowen · The Savior's Answer to Every Search✦ The Beatitudes — Doors Along the Same Corridor
Matthew 5:8 does not stand alone. It opens onto a corridor of Beatitudes — each one a different description of the same soul that finds God. Not the accomplished. Not the self-sufficient. Not the spiritually arrived. The open, the hungry, the poor in spirit.
These three Beatitudes form a portrait of the same soul: poor enough to receive, pure enough to see, hungry enough to be filled. This is not a description of spiritual achievement. It is a description of spiritual openness — the posture that makes the initiated different from the unbeliever. The same words, Lo, I am with you always, heard by two hearts — and producing two entirely different realities. The difference is not intelligence, not effort, not religious accomplishment. It is the purity of the interior through which the words travel. 🙏
They Shall See God
Not the intellectually satisfied — the pure in heart. Purity is singleness of direction. The heart turned wholly toward God finds Him not at the end of investigation but in the middle of surrender. Seek purity — and you shall find Me.
Lo, I Am With You
To the unbeliever — a mere word. To the initiated — a means of finding forever and everywhere the brightness of the divine glory. Same words. Two hearts. Two entirely different realities. The difference is the interior through which the words travel.
Costa de la Luz
The Coast of Light. George Bowen on seeing God — on the brightness of the divine glory. The location and the text arrived together this morning. Every place the motorhome parks becomes the place where the pure in heart find what they were looking for.
Forever grateful to God for sending Father Joe James to my life — so I could hear and believe the Gospel. A Catholic priest trained in Rome. A hospital at midnight. The moment the words stopped being mere words and became a means of finding forever and everywhere the brightness of the divine glory. This is where the pure in heart begins — not in a moment of moral achievement, but in a moment of absolute need, met by absolute grace. 🙏