Dear Saints in Santa Fe, and other far-off places,

Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ, who saw, listened, and asked questions.

Where is God?

Whether one believes in God or simply lives in these tumultuous times, the question bubbles up from the soul. Where is God? Where is compassion? Where is hope? The Israeli hostages, the beleaguered hospitals in Gaza, the cries from mourning families following yet another bombing, in the rubble, in the anguish, in all the unspeakable ways humans treat each other, the plaintive question arises again, and again, where is God?

Surely in the Bible, right? That’s where we see God walking in the Garden of Eden in the cool evening breeze, hear God telling Moses to “Let my people go!”, lamenting over the waywardness and wickedness of humanity, and offering the soothing words, “You are my beloved.” Commentators have noticed, however, that God speaks less and less as we turn the pages of the Bible, less and less as we move through the years, until that which is unspeakable in the world has also left God speechless.

How do we put into words, and wrap our minds around the horror that many are experiencing today? The war in Gaza has split friends and families, faith communities and religions, into factions that can’t speak with one another. What is the answer? And where is God in all this?

I invite you, then, to go on a journey with me. From Advent, starting December 3, through Easter and into the Pentecost season, I will be guiding us through the four movements of Spiritual Direction, Ignatian-style. Ignatius was the 16th century founder of the Jesuits, and he developed the spiritual exercises which is well-known in the Catholic tradition, but not so much in our Protestant world. I am a certified Spiritual Director, after two years of study and practice through John Carroll University in Cleveland not long before I came to Santa Fe, and will bring what I learned to our worship services to address the central question of spiritual direction: Where is God?

Come to the Adult Education class this Sunday, November 19th, when I will introduce spiritual direction and start this journey together.

Last Sunday we looked at the birth story of Moses in Exodus 2 and I concluded prematurely that God was not in this passage. But you all saw it differently, that God was between and beneath the verses, in the Hebrew midwives of the previous chapter who refused to kill the new-born baby boys, to the saving baskets, one in which Moses lay hidden in the reeds, to the managing of the situation by his young older sister Miriam, to Pharaoh’s daughter taking Moses in as her own child, despite the danger this might bring her.

Might God also be in our stories, with the hostages, among the rubble next to grieving families, in all the darkness, confusion, desperation, and death? What if God’s voice sounds like that of a wailing mother who has lost her child?

The question to me is no longer where is God, but where are we?

Grace and peace,

Harry