Visible absence, invisible Presence

A favourite of mine:

Letter to Lew Smedes about God's Presence

by Rod Jellema

I have to look for cracks and crevices.

Don't tell me how God's mercy

is as wide as the ocean, as deep as the sea.

I already believe it, but that infinite prospect

gets farther away the more we mouth it.

I thank you for lamenting his absences -

his absence from marriages going mad,

our sons dying young, from the inescapable

terrors of history: Treblinka, Vietnam.

September Eleven. His visible absence

makes it hard for us in our time

to celebrate his invisible Presence.

This must be why mystics and poets record

the slender incursions of splintered light,

echoes, fragments, odd words and phrases

like flashes through darkened hallways.

These stabs remind me that the proud

portly old church is really only

that cut green slip grafted into a tiny nick

that merciful God himself slit into the stem

of his chosen Judah. The thin and tenuous

thread we hang by, so astonishing,

is the metaphor I need at the shoreline

of all those immeasurable oceans of love.

(From the opening of "My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir" by Lewis B. Smedes)