Most of Julian Barnes’ novels are semi-autobiographical so we aren’t certain who is speaking, the fictional character or the novelist himself. In his Nothing to Be Afraid Of(2008), he has his older brother Jonathan, a professional philosopher, confessing: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”

I find this at once profound and courageous. This fictional character seems to be saying: The god in which I once (naively) “believed” I find unbelievable. What I do find believable, however, is my longing for a god in which I can believe.

He constructed his own notion of God, so that what he accurately finds unbelievable is his notion of a god but not yet the believable God. He can imagine a god only to the extent he can project beyond the finest humans he knows to something of an ideal man, a superman. Even as an image created, this is not yet God and, therefore, not yet believable.

It is rather like an ant looking up at an elephant and saying to himself: Well, I’m glad that big thing, whatever it is, didn’t step on me. But I won’t believe in this thing until it sits down with me on my level for a cup of coffee and we can chat in my language about what interests me. I want to know what it can do for me. I want something “believable,” i.e., something in which I am able and also willing to believe, whatever that means.

Nothing a man—whether Barnes, his character, or one of us—can find is ultimately believable. We can’t find God because we don’t know where to look.

We understandably look within, but what we find is an aching void crying out to be filled by something believable. We reasonably look outward and around us but what we find is equally disappointing. We miss him, without much of an idea of who he is.

Although Barnes’ character uses the personal pronoun he, his language would more accurately express his actual sense of the matter if he used the neuter it. So, too, would the common noun god rather than the proper noun God. (Such is what he actually supposes.)

God, in fact, is a person—not a concept, influence, or even a force. He is not some thing to be found, but a person who finds. Yet, his having found us is not what makes God believable, only believed. His believability, as it were, is absolute whether believed or not.

It is God, who alone is ultimately believable, who must find us. And he has. It is ours, then, to be found. Our job is to respond to God who always has found us—even when we weren’t looking or looking, but elsewhere.