The Edgy God.

So many of our great fiction writers have described God in ways that are quite moving. Frederick Buechner has done a fantastic job, as have many southern writers of fiction. I love Wendell Berry. Whenever I need a boost out of a rut, I read Berry's poetry, or scan one of his novels for passages that I have marked. The other day I was looking for a narrative section on what God is like. These words jar me from my complacency and begin my thought processes anew. I found it . . . by Wendell Berry: The speaker is Jayber Crow in Berry's wonderful novel of the same name:

"For a while again I couldn't pray. I didn't dare to. In the most secret place of my soul I wanted to beg the Lord to reveal himself in power. I wanted to tell him that it was time for his coming. If there was anything at all to what he had promised, why didn't he come in glory with angels and lay his hands on the hurt children and awaken the dead soldiers and restore the burned villages and the blasted and poisoned land? Why didn't he cow our arrogance?... But thinking such things was as dangerous as praying them. I knew who had thought such things before: "Let Christ the king of Israel descend now from the cross, that we may see and believe." Where in my own arrogance was I going to hide? Where did I get my knack for being a fool? If I could advise God, why didn't I just advise him (like our great preachers and politicians) to be on our side and give us victory? I had to turn around and wade out of the mire myself. Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave. And why not otherwise? Wouldn't it have put fine comical expressions on the faces of the scribes and the chief priests and the soldiers if at that moment he had come down in power and glory? Why didn't he do it? Why hasn't he done it at any one of a thousand good times between then and now? I knew the answer. I knew it a long time before I could admit it, for all the suffering of the world is in it. He didn't, he hasn't, because from the moment he did, he would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be his slaves. Even those who hated him and hated one another and hated their own souls would have to believe in him then. From that moment the possibility that we might be bound to him and he to us and us to one another by love forever would be ended. And so, I thought, he must forebear to reveal his power and glory by presenting himself as himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of his creatures. Those who wish to see him must see him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world."

That God is present in the "ordinary miracle of the existence of his creatures" gives me comfort. Where is God present for you?