TRANSCRIPT
NB. Still on the concept of talking or being listened to by God: apart from sheer human arrogance, why would people think that the Creator of the whole universe is personally interested in us and is prepared to help us sort out our problems when we ask him?
RW. Primarily, I think it’s a matter of reminding ourselves that, if God really isn’t just another very important bit of the universe, then God doesn’t, so to speak, have to choose what he pays attention to. God doesn’t have to choose between the big events and the small events, or the big phenomena and the small phenomena. God is present working, listening, speaking in everything, at the root of absolutely everything. In the Old Testament this is particularly seen in terms of what’s called the Wisdom Lterature, that somehow the deep structure and logic of the things of the world is where God is always at work.
NB. And I can I just clarify: the Wisdom Literature so this is Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon.
RW. Yes. Yes, that’s right. And in that, in that context, you can perhaps see that God doesn’t have to have his attention drawn to things; God is just there and, because God is not confined as we are by time and space, there’s sort of not a problem for God getting over a vast distance to come to us or turning his attention from one thing to another. And, of course, we can’t imagine it. This is why I say it’s folly to think we can say comprehensively what God is like. We can say, “I have no idea what it would be literally like to be God.”
God forbid we should. But we can say if God really is as we say is, that endless free loving energy that’s not confined by the world, well, we can at least begin to glimpse God isn’t going to have the problem that we might have in trying to attend to several billion people at once. It’s not that kind of reality we’re talking about.
REFLECT
“God is present – working, listening, speaking – in everything, at the root of absolutely everything.”
That means everything, including ourselves and each other and what we see, hear, feel and touch: God is in it all and, in how these work and their capabilities and their inter relationships, they give us clues about the nature of God. For instance, is the factor that the way we get to know another human person – by observation, interaction, becoming comfortable with them, etc. – the way we are to get to know God? Oh, sure, there is nothing to “see” of the presence of God, but there are also unseen clues that one must be attune to in order to pick up nuances of a human person. Perhaps there are similar unseen clues in ourselves and in nature that God has given us to reveal something about the nature of God! As the Archbishop says, “somehow the deep structure and logic of the things of the world is where God is always at work.”