For the time being
"God is no more blinding people with glaucoma, or testing them with diabetes, or purifying them with spinal pain, or choreographing the seeding of tumor cells through lymph, or fiddling with chromosomes, then he is jimmying floodwaters or pitching tornadoes at towns. God is no more cogitating which among us he plans to place here as bird-headed dwarves or elephant men -- or to kill by AIDS or kidney failure, heart disease, childhood leukemia, or sudden infant death syndrome -- than he is pitching lighting bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides, or setting fires. The very least likely things for which God might be responsible are what insureds call 'acts of God.'
"Then what, if anything, does he do? If God does not cause everything that happens, does God cause anything that happens? Is God completely out of the loop?
"Sometimes God moves loudly, as if spinning to another place like ball lightning. God is, oddly, personal; this God knows. Sometimes en route, dazzling or dimly, he shows an edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people who bear those souls, marveling, know it, and see the skies carousing around them, and watch cells stream and multiply in green leaves. He does not give as the world gives; he leads invisibly over many years, or he wallops for thirty seconds at a time. He may touch a mind, too, making a loud sound, or a mind may feel the rim of his mind as he nears. Such experiences are gifts to beginners. 'Later on,' a Hasid master said, 'you don't see these things anymore.' (Having seen, people of varying cultures turn, for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable -- to aiding and serving the afflicted and the poor.)
"Mostly, God is out of the physical loop. Or the loop is a spinning hole in his side. Simone Weil takes a notion from Rabbi Isaac Luria to acknowledge that God's hands are tied. To create, God did not extend himself but withdrew himself; he humbled and obliterated himself, and left outside himself the domain of necessity, in which he does not intervene. Even in the domain of souls, he interves only 'under certain conditions.'"
-- Annie Dillard, For The Time Being
"Then what, if anything, does he do? If God does not cause everything that happens, does God cause anything that happens? Is God completely out of the loop?
"Sometimes God moves loudly, as if spinning to another place like ball lightning. God is, oddly, personal; this God knows. Sometimes en route, dazzling or dimly, he shows an edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people who bear those souls, marveling, know it, and see the skies carousing around them, and watch cells stream and multiply in green leaves. He does not give as the world gives; he leads invisibly over many years, or he wallops for thirty seconds at a time. He may touch a mind, too, making a loud sound, or a mind may feel the rim of his mind as he nears. Such experiences are gifts to beginners. 'Later on,' a Hasid master said, 'you don't see these things anymore.' (Having seen, people of varying cultures turn, for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable -- to aiding and serving the afflicted and the poor.)
"Mostly, God is out of the physical loop. Or the loop is a spinning hole in his side. Simone Weil takes a notion from Rabbi Isaac Luria to acknowledge that God's hands are tied. To create, God did not extend himself but withdrew himself; he humbled and obliterated himself, and left outside himself the domain of necessity, in which he does not intervene. Even in the domain of souls, he interves only 'under certain conditions.'"
-- Annie Dillard, For The Time Being
posted by sadeeq | 1:08 AM | Permalink
|
1 comments
1 Comments:
That's kind of sad.
- Conservative in VA
Post a Comment
<< Home