God is in the Details

My daughter asked me last Wednesday, having seen a news piece on N Korea whether or not I believed what they said, that we were on the brink of WW3.

A country digs a hole and buries a bomb which rattles the fillings of world leaders from China, to America and all in between. And my 11 year old asks questions about war? How do I respond meaningfully to a question like that?

Then there’s the janjaweed in Sudan. A former member of the militia claims that they are in the pay of the Sudanese government. So tell us something we don’t know. But what do we do about it? And look around, Palestine and Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran. Look at the complex issues of the West and the way we exploit the developing world and kill the planet.

No wonder fundamentalism in its various forms is so attractive. Whether it’s religious or secular, it offers certainty in a very unsure world. All the answers are given with no shade, no grey. All of life is laid out in black and white.

In reality it’s a retreat from the complexity of the world.

I guess to respond to my child’s initial query I could cloak a real answer in a pile of sentimental, don’t worry your pretty little head kind of stuff. Don’t think about it and it will go away. But she’s a bright kid and she’d see through it, if not today, then some day.

Or I could respond in stupefied confusion which may only serve to deepen her anxiety and maybe contribute to her living a tentative life.

I have found myself this week wondering whether it is possible to navigate a way through this complicated world. And I have come to realise that the Christian tradition which I consider myself a part of says that I must struggle to understand my world. That I must embrace its complexity not escape from it or lie down under it.

To seek to understand it is to pay serious attention to it, to engage with a world which oftentimes defies comprehension. How does a seed grow? How does a child learn to read? Why does a man start a war? To begin to understand better how this world works, good and bad, is to come closer to God. After all, doesn’t the New Testament say that God is over all and through all and in all. To be ignorant of the world or to run from it, is to reject the world that God has made and that he inhabits.

For despite what the cliché says, I believe GOD is in the details.

[This was a BBC Radio Ulster Thought for the Day on Friday 20 October. With a nod in the direction of Radical Torah]