“Nouvelles de Chrétienté” No. 204 Is Published: Seeking God

The Essential Quest

Setting the theme for the Pentecost pilgrimage of 2024 are the words: “Seeking God”—that’s a vast program! Adding “with St. Thomas Aquinas” seems even to increase the challenge! How can we ask pilgrims who walk for three days, in rain or shine, to meditate on the Summa, the Contra gentes, and other theological treatises?

“These foot soldiers of the Pentecost are certainly generous, but they are not armed for theological jousts.” So the pusillanimous will say, uneasy to see the pilgrimage changed into a traveling congress or a walking symposium, punctuated by instructions which have become dissertations...

Souls of little faith! “Seeking God with St. Thomas Aquinas” seems too lofty a theme for you? Recognize, nevertheless, this indisputable fact: all the world is seeking. The question is for what!

The avaricious seek gold, the fastidious seek needles in haystacks; the complicated seek to reinvent the wheel... There are even those who seek themselves, oscillating between narcissism and navel-gazing.

And then there are “them that seek him, [...] them that seek the face of the God of Jacob” (Ps. 23:6). St. Thomas Aquinas is one of them, he who answers the question the Lord asked him:

• You have written well of Me, Thomas; what reward do you want Me to give you?
• None other but You, my Lord...

Our quest defines us better than our ID card—better still than a business card with the titles we boast of. Tell me what you seek, and I will tell you who you are. It is quite true that “where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also” (Mt. 6:21).

St. Thomas invites us to seek God “with our whole heart, with our whole soul, and with our whole mind” (Cf. Mt. 22:37). He was a great scholar, but above all an ardent saint. He did not seek knowledge which “puffeth up,” but charity which “edifieth” (I Cor. 8:1).

Enlightened by the Faith, inflamed with charity, he was too intelligent about divine mysteries to be an intellectual dried up among his shriveled books.

It is this superior wisdom that the pilgrimage of 2024 makes us seek, so that it profoundly transforms our existence as average Christians, shakes up our overly routine prayers, and makes us desire this “essential love, logic of cordial and enduring faith” (Paul Verlaine).

All this is so that we may, at the end of our earthly pilgrimage, sing with St. Thomas Aquinas:

Jesus! Whom for the present veiled I see,

What I so thirst for, oh, vouchsafe to me,

That I may see Thy countenance unfolding,

And may be blest Thy glory in beholding.

(Adoro Te Devote)

Fr. Alain Lorans