Where is God?

We are in a world that bewilders us, that always has bewildered man. We feel ourselves helpless, lost in the world’s immensity, crushed by the natural course of happenings, baffled and disappointed. How to account for all the tragical side of man’s life encountering us, so to say, at every step, lurking from every corner, from every issue of the usual morning paper, with its catastrophes, burning airplanes, railroad accidents, explosions, inundation, wars? And what of our personal life drifting imperceptibly into the great chasm that is the end and limit of our life here? And what of this perpetual flow of changes, the ever flowing, incessant, untiring stream of decay, of mutability, of passing away? And of the silence of immense expanses giving no answer, void of response to our anguish, to our appeal, to our challenge, and seeming to be void of a higher Presence? “Le silence de ces espaces infinis m’effraie,” said Pascal. What is the meaning of this silent, crushing, implacable and unresponsive universe, of its life and decay and passing away, crumbling to pieces and rebirth in the millions and billions of astronomical years? What is the bearing, the intimate hidden sense of this universe, its life, its laws, its structure, its silence, its cold magnificence, and the step of Death marching through it? What is the sense of our passing joys, and sorrows, lives and deaths? Is there not in this whirlwind of deaths and lives, soon to be forgotten, to leave redeemed, unutterable, bitterness and disappointment? There could be no response against this presentation of the world’s life and personal existence and the utter senselessness of the awfulness of every life and every existence, if there had not been a decisive and exhaustive revelation of the world’s “background”, of the secret source of Eternal Life, eternal production, eternal reality behind the structure of this world. This revelation of the secret “springs” of all life, all reality - and also of the sense of life, for life has got a sense (meaning) - was the active, condescending, self-disclosure of the Love of God. God revealed Himself in “the Son of His Love.” There is no void -- all is full of His nearness. Even in sufferings, in death, in utter dereliction He is near. He is there - having descended Himself into the abyss of suffering and death and of love, His love having brought Him to do so. “This is love; not that we loved God, but that God loved us and gave his Son as the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10). There is a sense, an aim, a plan in the mystery of the world. The revelation of God in His incarnate Son, as a condescending, creating, and restoring Love is the nerve of the world’s life, the hidden mystery of all being and becoming, transfiguring life even in the deepest abysses of

our’s and the world’s existence.

- Russian theologian and author, Nicholas Arseniev -