God’s kind silence

I  have always been troubled by God’s silence. I was about 13 when my mother took us for lunch at her sister’s place after church one Sunday. My uncle, an agnostic, said my mother was indoctrinating us with religion, or something to that effect. Up till then I was comfortable with God’s calm silence. It fitted well with the stillness of all conquering majesty that has nothing to prove. But for once I wanted God to manifest his presence. Needless to say it didn’t happen.

I don’t think it was the same day, but in the furniture of my mind it certainly was around that period I dreamt of growing starlight approaching me. As I looked with wonder and interest, the intensity of the light became too much for my eyes. I crouched, protecting my eyes. The adult in me has been tempted to psychoanalyse this dream, but, for some reason, I prefer to leave it at the surface level of my understanding.

At one stage of my life, especially at university, I lived as though the issue of religion did not matter much, though I’ve always had an incorrigible desire to understand God’s ways. The desire has been persistent in all stages of my life, growing more intense as the sand rose in my hourglass. In time, as I grew accustomed to God’s ways I fell in love with God. I like how God created time to allow our minds that rely on material (biological) means to process information. I like the way, in narrowing focus and heightening tension, the Lord God, through historical process and scientific discovery unfolds creation before our eyes. The way God is gratuitous with his bounties, and copious with his irrevocable gifts; choosing to allow the sun to shine on all.

More than anything, I like God’s effortless sovereignty, especially over Satan, the ultimate wanderer. The Book of Job, where God takes a rather irritating (to those of us who tend to forget that Satan too is one of “God’s sons”) considerate attitude: “Whence comest thou?” The first wanderer among the sons of God answered with a desire to fatten his stable. I’m sure the rest is familiar to the readers of these pages. Job felt the mark put on Cain: “[W]hy hast thou set me as a mark against thee, so that I’m a burden to myself?”

I like how God’s consistent nature compels him to serve justice without extinguishing love. His justice never cancels grace; I like that it’s never cancelled, as seen in the story of Cain who discovers the value of living in God’s immediate presence late as he cries in guilty poignancy: “My punishment is too great to bear! … I must avoid your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth.” All humans know how that feels, to be “hidden from your Face”. Surely it must have been worse for Cain who knew how it felt to be in God’s constant “smiling Face” to be suddenly deprived of it. My punishment is too great to bear! My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me? The cries reverberate throughout the ages. God is silent. But the silence is not deafening, rather distinctly audible. Of course, as Newman saw it, we’re implicated in some primordial mystery.

The sons of Adam, having discovered the life outside Eden, “began to invoke the Lord by name”; to seek the ways of the Lord. Cain becomes a wanderer in banishment, as in wandering Abram finds God who changes his name to Abraham, having lost his old ways. Moses follows suit, takes off his sandals before a burning bush, Elijah climbs the mountain to find the whisper of silence in a quiet cave, Pascal is troubled by the silence of the skies, and so on.

They’re all led by the kind silence to God’s voice: “I am El Shaddai. Walk in my ways and be blameless.”