mmh Blog

I first came across the idea that you can find God, or that God can find you, when I was conducting fieldwork with converts to Islam in London. During the weekly discussion group I used to attend, the sisters often talked about their experiences of conversion, and faith, and religion. All the stories rotated on the same trope: a moment, well determined in the sisters’ past, where they had found Islam. These moments were exquisitely mundane and disparate in nature.

Some of the sisters found Islam thanks to a lover that they then left (but stayed with Allah),
others because of a bus who broke down in front of a mosque,
others through academic interests,
friends,
or a journey. 

The sisters often talked of their conversion stories with a sense of abandonment, as if they were conceiding themselves to a much loved, but somehow troubled, difficult and demanding, lover. Once a sister told me that if she could, she wouldn’t have chosen Islam, but that once God had found her, she could not turn away anymore. 

I got a similar sense of abandonment from some of my Christian interlocutors during my fieldwork this year. They would often tell me how they found Jesus, perhaps in a moment of difficulty, after years of being atheists, or thanks to a beautiful landscape. Others stressed how Jesus had found them in their worst moment. These stories too looked at Jesus, and so God, as an irresistable lover, yet an annoying one.

One that keeps knocking at your heart even when you want to keep it shut and sealed. 

So much I heard these narrations, that I started using them myself. When asked about my faith, I often tried to isolate the moment I found God, or the one God found me.

Was it when I took first communion at ten years old, and suddenly felt very light and happy?
Was it when years later I decided to study anthropology of religion(s)?
Or was it through the endless chats  I always had and have about God with my family?
Or maybe when during Covid I asked my dad to teach me how to pray?
Was it when the adhan from my uncle’s balcony in Egypt healed my broken heart after the end of an important relationship? 
Or was it when I cried on my own, in an empty church, because my grandpa had just passed and I could not breath anymore?

In all these moments, and so many more I cannot recall, God was close to me. All these moments felt to me revelatory of some deeper truth about "the divine.” In all these moments, I felt abandonment, I felt love, I felt closeness as if God was with me, present in the room. So when did God find me? Or when did I find God? 

I cannot isolate a single moment of discernment. I remember as a kid I would often say to my friends that it would come a moment for me to choose, whether I wanted to be a Christian or a Muslim. Another moment of discernment that never arrived, and I don’t know if it will, nor if it has to.

Maybe I’m looking at God in the wrong way.
Maybe there is nothing to be found for me.
Perhaps God was there all along.
And the relationship is one of becoming, rather than being.
It’s a relationship in the -ing form, of constant finding each other, God and I, over and over again. Like a couple married fifty years that renews vows, in the good and in the bad.