Walking in Wonder by John O'Donohue & John Quinn & Krista Tippett

Author:John O'Donohue & John Quinn & Krista Tippett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

ABSENCE OF GOD

And finally, to come on to one of the great absences from the world, which everyone complains about, and that is the absence of God. Particularly in our century, with the Holocaust and the world wars, Yugoslavia and all the rest of it, there’s a great cry out against the absence of God. In the eighteenth century, Hegel said God was dead, and then in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche took that up; it is an old question. In the classical tradition, theologians were aware of the absence of God as well. There was the notion of the Deus absconditus, the absconded or vanished God. One of the points of absolute subversive realism of the Christian story is that Christ came out of the safety of the sky and stood in Calvary against the absolute silence of God and carried the suffering of the world. The Crucifixion is that bleak place where no certainty can ever settle, and the realism of that is incredibly truthful to the depth and power of absence that suffering and pain and oppression bring to the world. And that is what the Eucharist is about; in the Eucharist you have the most amazing symphony of complete presence based on the ultimate absence and the ultimate kind of emptiness. It is fascinating, too, that sometimes absence creates new possibility. When the carpenter rose from the dead, they wanted him to stay around, and he said no, that he must go, in order to let the Spirit come. So sometimes that which is absent allows something new to emerge.

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