The God of Awe

Writing as a commentary to the Job lectionary reading for this week, Annie Dillard explains God’s response to Job’s demand for an answer to his trials,

"God is spirit, spirit expressed infinitely in the universe, who does not give as the world gives. His home is absence, and there he finds us. In the coils of absence we meet him by seeking him. God lifts our souls to their roots in his silence…This God does not direct the universe, he underlies it…The more we wake to holiness, the more of it we give birth to, the more we introduce, expand and multiply it on earth, the more God is ‘on the field’"). There is a "god" who is dead and perhaps that is the one we have assumed at the center of our lives: ‘that tasking and antiquated figure who haunts children and repels strays, who sits on the throne of judgment frowning and figuring, and who with the strength of his arm dishes out human fates, in the form of cancer or cash, to 5.9 billion people – to teach, dazzle, rebuke, or try us, one by one, and to punish or reward us, day by day, for our thoughts, words, and deeds’.

taken from “Holy Sparks: A Prayer for the Silent God” in Best Spiritual Writing 2000.