House Wren : Where is God Today?

House Wren

This is a House Wren.  He’s perched out on the end of a branch singing loudly, announcing his presence in a very dramatic way.  There’s a certain irony in this photograph:  earlier I had encountered a woman who expressed doubt about the presence of many birds at the park - because she hadn’t seen many birders!  There is a certain logic to her association, but it’s the fallacy of effect leading to cause.  To mix species:  she had the cart before the horse.  It’s an easy mistake to make, in all kinds of contexts.  The human mind excels at finding patterns, at discerning order in random events.  It’s a survival mechanism honed over thousands of years.  But we need to do so consciously, carefully distinguishing what is empirically present and what we introduce.

Reading the Bible, God is a constant, active Presence.  It is God’s words that create light and the rest of the universe.  It is God‘s message spoken directly to Abram that begins the family lineage of the Jewish people.  It is God’s hands-on involvement that frees the Hebrews from Egyptian servitude and guides them for 40 years until the promised land.  God sends messages through the prophets and messenger angels.  Reading of this era, we can’t help but be struck by the overwhelming, seemingly daily involvement of God in human affairs.  In matters small and large, from issues of animal control to cosmology, arguably the most notable feature of the Biblical narrative is the leading role God plays.  For many, it is strikingly different than the modern era.

Where is God today?  Undoubtedly this was a question the Sages asked at the destruction of the First Temple.   And the Second Temple.  And which we in the whole world asked during the Shoah.  Where is God today?  It is an unanswerable question if we attempt to analogize to earlier times.  God does not speak and act today in the same way depicted in the Bible.  But our lack of perception by no means implies a lack of Presence.  Could the span of our millennia be the merest blip in God’s timeline?  Certainly.  It’s our faith that reminds us of misordered implications, of the relationship between cause and effect.  And it’s our faith that reminds us that God is here whether we hear God or not, just as the Wren is present with or without me to receive his photo.