"There would be a strong argument for saying that much of the most powerful preaching of our time is the preaching of the poets, playwrights, novelists because it is often they better than the rest of us who speak with awful honesty about the absence of God in the world and about the storm of his absence, both without and within, which because it is unendurable unlivable, drives us to look to the eye of the storm."(F. Buechner "Listening to Your Life" p.25)
There are times when I have certainly read a book or a poem, seen a play or a movie and said, wow that really had something to say. Certainly more than one sermon preached in a church has drawn from sources that aren't intentionally religious and yet speak so eloquently on the some of the core topics that faith usually addresses.
And perhaps it is easier for those outside of the religious establishment to speak of the sensing of the absence of God, because those of us with religious convictions aren't supposed to have doubts. We are supposed to see God everywhere and at all times. Or at least that's what others project onto us.
The real truth is that much like those secular writers and even some of the Biblical writers we also know from experience when God feels distant to us or even absent. It is when life is coming on stronger than the most violent weather phenomenon.
And yet as a person of faith I do know that when I'm caught in that storminess that often is a part of being alive, by facing the eye and finding God in it. As I recall the eye is that calm between.
Blessings,
Ed
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