Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Windy Wonderings

I was thinking this morning, with no small amount of fascination, about the fact that God is always in the world but so unobtrusively much of the time that He’s easy to miss. I was pondering particularly the Biblical statement that the Spirit of God is like the wind, blowing where it wills. Most of the time, we are unaware of the movement of the winds about us unless they are intense or absent. The gentle breezes go pretty much unnoticed during an average day as we scurry from one activity to another, our minds whirling with to-do items, problems, our physical condition, worries and woes, or circumstantial joys.. We cannot see the wind but we can see what it does, how it moves things about, causes the trees to sway, even break, inspiring large bodies of water to “wave” and ships to sail upon them, kites to soar, soil to erode, perspiration to evaporate from skin on a scorching afternoon, and so much more. Wind can virtually create, reshape or destroy our landscape. We bless its appearance sometimes, curse it at others. And so it is with God.

There’s a.supposedly “new” brand of atheism afoot these days, represented in a rash of books with titles like “God is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything” and “The God Delusion.”and, oh, my favorite “God, the Failed Hypothesis, How Science Shows that God does Not Exist.” I hope He’s not too upset when He finds out. I work in a library so I get exposed to these tomes along with the respondent attempts of Christians and other thinkers to dispute them. I’ll have to leave it up to the experts in apologetics and debate to battle this out on an intellectual level. I’m just going to point to the wind and the fact that millions and millions of individuals in this world, at all levels of intellect and accomplishment, find faith to be their greatest and most productive emotion; to the fact that the world has not blown itself to bits so far despite the rise and fall of countless despots and cruel and pervasive governments, that day after day people whose lives are filled with apparent tragedy and pain, physical and emotional, find their greatest solace and strength in the relationship they have with the invisible wind of God. We sing a song in our church, written by one of our music ministers, “Wind of God, come and blow, breathe new life into these dry bones.” I guess that would be my prayer for the authors of all these new books that are, in reality, only an updated re-hash of old faithless and I suspect, bitter, blather. Science is a wonderful thing if it’s based in the truth, and not focused in some narrow hallway of exploration. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line these people fell into an investigatory vacuum and became so nearsighted in their scientific and philosophical pursuits that they seemed to have overlooked enormous bodies of evidence against their assumptions.

WHO HAS SEEN THE WIND ?

BY: CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling

The wind is passing thro'

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads

The wind is passing by.