How to Get Closer to God: A Personal Journey Through Ancient Wisdom and Modern Practice

I've spent the better part of two decades wrestling with this question, and I'll tell you right now – there's no magic formula. But that's actually the beautiful part. The path to divine connection is as unique as your fingerprint, though certain truths seem to echo across every tradition I've studied.

Let me start with something that might surprise you. Getting closer to God often begins with getting further away from what you think God is. I learned this the hard way after years of trying to force spiritual experiences through sheer willpower. It wasn't until I stopped trying to control the process that something shifted.

The Paradox of Seeking

You know that feeling when you're desperately searching for your glasses only to realize they're on your head? Spiritual seeking can be like that. We often look everywhere except the most obvious place – within ourselves. This isn't some new-age platitude; it's a truth that mystics from Rumi to Teresa of Ávila have pointed to for centuries.

The divine connection you're seeking isn't something you achieve. It's something you uncover. Think of it like cleaning a dusty mirror – the reflection was always there, just obscured.

Silence: The Forgotten Language

In our noise-saturated world, silence has become almost extinct. Yet every spiritual tradition I've encountered treats silence as sacred ground. Not the awkward silence of a failed conversation, but the pregnant silence where possibility lives.

I remember my first silent retreat. Three days in, I was ready to climb the walls. My mind was like a hyperactive child, bouncing from thought to thought. But somewhere around day five, something cracked open. The mental chatter didn't stop, but I stopped believing it was me. In that space between thoughts, I found something I'd been missing without even knowing it.

Start small. Five minutes of morning silence before checking your phone. You'd be amazed what emerges when you stop filling every moment with stimulation.

Prayer: Beyond the Shopping List

Most of us learned prayer as a kind of cosmic wish list. "Please give me this, help me with that." There's nothing wrong with petitionary prayer – sometimes we need to cry out. But there's so much more.

Prayer can be a conversation, a listening, even an argument. Some of my most profound moments with the divine have come from wrestling matches, Jacob-style. God can handle your anger, your doubt, your raw honesty. In fact, I'd argue that authentic relationship requires it.

Try this: instead of always talking during prayer, spend half the time listening. Not for an audible voice necessarily, but for that subtle shift in awareness, that gentle knowing that arises from somewhere deeper than thought.

The Body as Temple (But Not Like You Think)

Western spirituality often treats the body as an inconvenient meat suit we're stuck with until we can escape to pure spirit. This is nonsense, and frankly, a bit insulting to the divine craftsmanship of our physical form.

Your body is not an obstacle to spiritual connection – it's a gateway. This is why practices like yoga, tai chi, and sacred dance have endured for millennia. They're not just exercise; they're embodied prayer.

I discovered this accidentally through rock climbing. There's a moment when you're fifty feet up a cliff face where your mind goes completely quiet. Every cell is present, aware, alive. That's meditation in motion. That's the body teaching the soul how to be fully here.

Sacred Study: Beyond Information

Reading spiritual texts isn't about accumulating information. It's about transformation. The ancient practice of lectio divina – divine reading – treats texts as living entities that speak differently each time you encounter them.

Pick one verse, one paragraph, even one word, and sit with it. Let it work on you like water on stone. I've spent months with a single line from the Psalms, and it kept revealing new layers.

Here's the thing about sacred texts – they're not meant to be conquered or mastered. They're meant to master you, to reorganize your inner landscape. Approach them with humility and they'll teach you things no commentary ever could.

Community: The Forgotten Ingredient

American spirituality loves the lone wolf narrative. The solitary seeker finding God on a mountaintop. But here's what those stories leave out – even hermits had spiritual directors. Even Buddha had a sangha.

We're wired for connection, and that includes spiritual connection through others. Find your tribe. It might be a traditional congregation, a meditation group, or three friends who meet for coffee and soul talk.

But here's the crucial part – don't look for people who will only affirm what you already believe. Growth happens at the edges, in the creative tension of different perspectives held in love.

The Dark Night: When God Feels Absent

Nobody likes to talk about this, but sometimes the path to deeper connection leads through absence. Mother Teresa wrote extensively about feeling abandoned by God for decades, yet she continued her work. John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul.

These periods of spiritual dryness aren't punishment or abandonment. They're often preparation, a deepening of capacity. Like a tree that grows stronger roots in drought, sometimes our connection to the divine deepens precisely when we can't feel it.

If you're in one of these seasons, don't panic. Don't force it. Sometimes the most profound act of faith is simply showing up when the well feels dry.

Service: The Secret Door

Here's something I wish someone had told me earlier – one of the fastest ways to experience the divine is to serve others. Not from a place of religious obligation or to earn heavenly brownie points, but from genuine love.

There's a moment when you're holding someone who's grieving, or serving food to someone who's hungry, where the boundaries dissolve. You're not helping them – you're recognizing the divine in them and in yourself. It's like God meeting God through human hands.

The Integration

Real spiritual growth isn't about peak experiences on Sunday morning. It's about Tuesday afternoon when you're stuck in traffic. It's about how you treat the barista who messed up your order. It's about finding the sacred in the mundane.

This is where most of us get tripped up. We compartmentalize our spiritual life, keeping it separate from our "real" life. But the divine doesn't recognize these artificial boundaries. Every moment is an opportunity for connection, every interaction a chance to practice presence.

A Personal Note

I used to think getting closer to God meant becoming someone else – holier, more patient, less human. What I've discovered is exactly the opposite. The closer I get to the divine, the more myself I become. Not the false self constructed from others' expectations, but the true self that was there all along.

This journey isn't about perfection. It's about connection. It's about showing up with all your flaws and doubts and saying, "Here I am." Because in the end, that's all any of us can offer – our genuine, imperfect, seeking selves.

The path to God isn't up some spiritual mountain. It's right where you are, in this moment, reading these words. The question isn't how to get closer to God. The question is: are you willing to notice that you already are?

Authoritative Sources:

Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick, Oxford University Press, 1991.

John of the Cross. Dark Night of the Soul. Translated by E. Allison Peers, Image Books, 1959.

McGrath, Alister E. Christian Spirituality: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 1999.

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. New Directions Publishing, 1961.

Mother Teresa. Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta. Edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, Doubleday, 2007.

Nouwen, Henri J.M. The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. Doubleday, 1992.

Palmer, Parker J. A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. Jossey-Bass, 2004.

Rohr, Richard. Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. Jossey-Bass, 2011.

Teresa of Ávila. The Interior Castle. Translated by Mirabai Starr, Riverhead Books, 2003.

Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. Dover Publications, 2002.