Where Is God in This Picture?

Tell me where you see God in the following story.

Often I try to pray when I run in the morning. Often it doesn’t work: my mind wanders off to (if it’s a good day) hobbies and books and things I love or (if it isn’t) anxiety about the day ahead or the week ahead or this difficult meeting or that difficult phone call.

Last Wednesday was not a good day. The week was tricky to begin with, and the trickiness was to reach its climax in the day to come. I have been working on mindfulness lately—paying complete attention to the here and now—but on this day my mind ran away from me. Toward the end of the run, I tried to get back to what was happening around me.

Which is when I saw the pileated woodpecker.

Birds enthrall me, and I’ve only seen a pileated once before in my life. They appear rarely, almost never, in our neighborhood. So all my attention was suddenly riveted on the woodpecker. In short, a single bird brought me back to the mindfulness to which, I believe, God is calling me.

So where was God in all this?

Was God somehow in my return to mindfulness—inspiring it, as it were—so that I could see and enjoy the woodpecker? Certainly possible. Did God call that bird to that tree for that particular purpose? A yes answer, of course, raises the oft-asked question of the whereabouts of God on 9/11, or during the Holocaust, or in the life of the child who dies suddenly. But ascribing this event to mere coincidence doesn’t work for me; the presence of the Divine in that moment was almost palpable.

I wrestle with questions like this all the time, and wrestling with God is good. Sometimes, though, I run up against the impenetrable, or at least the too-difficult-for-me. In cases like that, I’m beginning to believe, it’s time to stop thinking and simply breathe in the experience—specifically, the Divine within the experience.

There’s solid precedent for this approach. According to the sage Ben Sira, “Neither seek what is too difficult for you, nor investigate what is beyond your power” (Sirach 3:21). The psalmist speaks in a similar vein: “I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me” (Psalm 131:1). Thomas Merton, the Franciscan monk and thinker, writes approvingly of Zen’s emphasis, not on explaining, but on paying attention.

Maybe, when we follow both wisdoms—the call to wrestle with God and the call to stop wrestling—we approach God with more of ourselves: our minds, certainly, but also our deepest selves. This, according to Jesus, is precisely what the Father so ardently desires: those who “worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23).