And you call on God, and God is dead.*

Deus Absconditus. God, unknowable by the human mind. Annie Dillard wrote the following in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "In the Koran, Allah asks, 'The heaven and earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?' It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? . . . Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator's, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears around the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey?" The trajectory of my life of late has kept these questions at the fore of my mind. On July 30th a good friend of mind was killed in Northern Iraq. Wrestling with Jason's death, the meaning of his life, and the impact all of this has on those who loved him has exacerbated my thoughts about God's relationship (or lack thereof) to human experience. Jason grew up with the same faith that I did, and went on to reject it for many of the reasons I continue to wrestle with it. I think I always assumed (i.e., had hope) that at some point Jason would come to some sense of peace with God, that his present crisis would be resolved in the future. But now there is no future for Jason. He will not go on to figure things out, to at the very least come to some sort of tenuous ceasefire with God in the battle of assigning responsibility for pain and suffering. Instead he died at age 29, fighting a meaningless war in a (seemingly) meaningless universe. Is God really in charge of all of this? These are the sorts of questions that I know would get me prematurely sent to hell in a handbasket by many in the evangelical Christian world, and yet I cannot help but think that God, assuming he does exist and care, would want me to think these thoughts, to wrestle with this reality. It is difficult to go to church these days, and today the sermon was from the book of Ecclesiastes. For the living know that they will die; But the dead know nothing, And they have no more reward, For the memory of them is forgotten . . . While church did nothing to dispel the dark cloud around me (rather, I sulked around morosely all afternoon, listened to melancholy music, laying on the couch thinking dark thoughts, and wishing I were drinking), it did remind me that perhaps the current shallowness of my belief in God is not perhaps so heretical as some would make it out to be. Dillard continues in Pilgrim: "'God is subtle,' Einstein said, 'but not malicious.' Again, Einstein said that 'nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning.' It could be that God has not absconded but spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God 'set bars and doors' and said, 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.' But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?"
*Bonnie "Prince" Billy: "Love Comes to Me" (from The Letting Go)