Where should I begin?
This is the question the creative act asks, every painting, every poem, song, novel, and essay. And life, the life we call living, is a creative act, a sort of constructive process of making our world, a reality by choice and choosing. Each choice we make becomes our created reality. But the overriding question is—in response to what do we create?
In her book, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg quotes Robert Alter as writing, “the most characteristic moments of biblical narrative:” “The world is seen as offering all sorts of access to human understanding, but there is also no absolute fit between the nature of reality and the human mind. The biblical tale is fashioned in ways that repeatedly remind us of that ontological discrepancy.”
Alter seems to be telling me I experience things I do not understand. I agree.
Zornberg writes about a sense of loss in the lineage from Adam to Joseph. She expresses a compelling and deep understanding of what Scripture is telling us. What emerges in the telling is the age-old question, “Where is God?”
The question evokes in the asking a sense of loss, a sort of absence expressing Alter’s divide between the nature of reality and the human mind. Too often do we fill the divide with every immediate desire we think can satisfy—choices and choosing. When we think God is absent, we begin to construct a reality to our liking, a response to “not having,” and not having fuels the engine of humanity and culture. Not having becomes our god.
Sometimes we read Scripture with accepted knowledge and miss what God intends us to know. Sometimes we read and put something there that is not there, a way for us to make God agree to our created reality. A better way is to ask, “What is the problem in the text?” then set aside those preconceived notions and created realities and notice what is really there.
So, I do not think God is ever absent, but He is silent at times. Too often the two are confused. And why is He silent?
I trust His silence is a means to still us, to ask us to be quiet long enough to hear Him, to deepen our relationship with Him, to stop relying on self and rest in Him. Silence is His call to repentance.
Loss is God’s way of separating us from our desire to fill this sense of not having with our own created reality. In a way, he deconstructs what we have created. He thwarts our rationalizations intended to keep us from constructing a false peace, a coherent reality.
And if we think God silent, isn’t it better to seek Him, to search for what He wishes us to know over human understanding? Isn’t it better for us to be silent, so He can speak?
Be still, and know that I am God, I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth! (Psalm 46:10, NKJV).