St. Augustine, Does Finding God End Our Searching?

Question 021.

Is God to be sought even after we have found him?

Such is the way with incomprehensible things – they must be investigated so that no one believes he has found a mere nothing, when in fact he has been able to find how incomprehensible that is what he was seeking…And making progress in the search itself, he becomes ever better while seeking so great a good….For it is both sought in order that in finding it, it may be more sweetly enjoyed, and found that it might be more zealously sought.

from St. Augustine Answers 101 Questions on Prayer by Fr. Ermatinger.

If one has found a thing, has he yet obtained the thing? If one has found a person whom they love, does that person yet love him? Thusly, the finding of God after having so sought Him does not end the search. The search for God is not simply to find but to obtain, and in the being obtained to plumb the depths and reach the heights. Even the reaching of these are not enough to end the search, for God is both mysterious and ineffable as well as eternal; all things that created man is not. But beyond these things, God is a person; not formula, ideology, nor mantra. He is I AM WHO I AM. The search for God is the encounter between persons; between creature and the good and loving Creator. This is the sweetness that lies at the center of the arduous search; that the search is not to obtain perfect comprehension and mastery of a subject but to come face to face with the very person of God. God is goodness itself and wills for us to be good ourselves by having that goodness reside at the center of our souls; to have Him at the center of our soul. And if God should so reside perfectly in our center, and our gaze should not be distracted by any lesser thing, still then the search for God will not have come to an end. For even in the perfection of finding and being obtained, there is yet the infinite between God and His beloved creation, an infinite that cannot reach finality even in eternity. It is a love that will ever deepen, ever be more zealously sought, even as it is ever found and obtained. A man cannot drink the oceans, let alone the abyss of creation, yet man has been made to drink the love of God in eternity.

— PPP