Made for God

God made you, and he made you for himself, so your heart is always searching for him, and he never stops drawing you close.

That is this lesson in one sentence. Paragraphs 26 to 49 begin Part One of the Catechism, the part about what we believe, and they start with us: our search for God and how we can come to know him.

1. CCC 26

   Faith is our answer to a God who gives himself to us.

   When we say the Creed, we begin with “I believe” or “We believe.” So the Catechism first asks what it means to believe. Faith is our response to God, who shows himself to us and gives himself to us. The Catechism takes this in three steps, starting here: our search for God, how God comes to meet us, and our answer of faith.

2. CCC 27–30

   Deep down, every human heart is looking for God.

   God made us for himself, so only in him will we find the truth and happiness we never stop searching for. That is why people everywhere, all through history, have prayed and offered sacrifices. We can forget God or turn away from him, for reasons like anger at the evil in the world, the worries and riches of life, or the bad example of believers. But God never stops calling us, and as Saint Augustine prayed, “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (CCC 30).

3. CCC 31–35 · 36–38

   The world and your own heart point to God.

   There are ways to come to know God, starting from the world, with its order and beauty, and from ourselves, with our conscience, our freedom and our longing for happiness. These ways are not science-lab proofs, but strong reasons that can lead us to real certainty that God exists. Still, reason alone finds this hard, and God wants us close, so he reveals himself (shows us who he is) and gives us the grace (his help) to welcome him in faith. These ways also help us see that “faith is not opposed to reason” (CCC 35).

4. CCC 39–43

   We can truly speak about God, even though our words fall short.

   Because our minds can know God, we can talk about him with everyone, including people who do not believe. We name God by starting from the good things he made, since their truth, goodness and beauty reflect his perfection. Our words really do reach God, but he is far greater than anything he made. As the Catechism puts it, “Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God” (CCC 42).

5. CCC 44–49

   In Brief: we come from God, and we are on our way to him.

   We are religious by nature, made to share life with God, and only with him is our life fully human and happy. Creation and our conscience can make us certain he exists, and we can truly name him, even if our words never hold all of him. Without our Creator we would simply vanish, so the love of Christ urges believers to bring God's light to those who do not know him.

“The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself.”

The line to remember · CCC 27

“so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’ as even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’”

Acts 17:27–28 · NABRE

To grope is to reach out in the dark, feeling your way. Even then, God is not far from any one of us. That includes you, right now.