Flight from God

(Found here)

“In every age man has been in flight from God. What distinguishes the Flight today from every other flight is this: once Faith was the universal, and prior to the individual; there was an objective world of Faith, while the flight was only accomplished subjectively, within the individual man. It came into being through the individual man’s separating himself from the world of Faith by an act of decision. A man who wanted to flee had first to make his own flight. The opposite is true today. The objective and eternal world of Faith is no more; it is Faith which has to be remade moment by moment through the individual’s act of decision, that is to say, through the individual cutting himself off from the world of the Flight.

. . .

Whithersoever they may flee, there is God. Wherever they find themselves, once more they flee away, for God is everywhere. Ever more desperately they flee; but God is already in every place, waiting for them to come...Ever more desperately they fling themselves away, but they can only fling themselves so far, because they have torn themselves away from God...Yet God’s power is still manifested in man’s tearing himself away from God...They are being hunted by God and they can move so swiftly only because he hunts them. Even this is God’s love, that he, he and no other, wills to pursue the fleeing, so that he, the swiftest, may always be the nearest to those in flight.”

~Max Picard