Where Is God Hanging Around?

Thomas Merton has come to visit me this morning.  He asks me this question:  “Where are you seeing God hanging around these days?  How about Jesus?  Seen Him around?”  These are appropriate questions and a “Christian” is supposed to be able to answer them. If God isn’t hanging around somewhere in this world, if I can’t get a glimpse of God’s love operating in this world, then all my faith is null and void.  Merton told me this many years ago, when he wrote:  

“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited.  But because He cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, his place is with the others for whom there is no room.  His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, who are tortured, bombed, and exterminated.  With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in the world.  He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst…It is in these that He hides Himself, for whom there is no room” (The Catholic Worker, December 1973).

I want to repeat for those who have recently talked with me about their present crises the following line from Merton:  “He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst…”  Think about it.  The existence of crisis in any person’s life actually conceals the mystery of Christ.  Crisis (difficulty)—if we do not hide from it, suppress it, flee it, ignore it, or become its victims—is the visitation of “death” in our lives.  A crisis that seems to threaten our very life—“is always terrible, wonderful, eventually inescapable, saving and holy.”  Why?  Because in that crisis we discover that God is stronger than that particular “death,” that God is in our history, in our biography, and seeks to enhance our life.  All that we experience is the scene of His Presence and a matter of His care because God embraces human life over and against death in all its myriad forms.

This is not just an individual thing by any means.  It happens on a far larger scale—including within the nation.  The existence of crisis in our national life conceals the mystery of Christ.  Take, for example, the children at the border—a crisis—we must not hide from it, suppress it, flee it, or ignore it, or become its victims.  That crisis and every other crisis is a confrontation between death and life—and there we see God embracing life—not death and I believe God will prevail.