I’ll take an underlying god any day over such a jealous, petulant god. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away from everyone who puts everything in his hands.

I prefer his silence. It gives us a chance to recognize we have depths to plumb, depths unknown and wasted when we’re distracted by reaching for something in the sky. His silence elevates us from sheep to shaman – we can learn to fill in the space with dancing and singing, with poetry and prose, prayers meant for our ears alone. we can breathe life into the invisible with our imaginations and our laughter. our gods are otherwise so loud and so demanding. ~fey, Fey Accompli

This came in response to an excerpt from For the Time Being by one Annie Dillard, in this case speaking on Meister Eckhart’s attitude towards loss. (By the by, Eckhart is not usually noted for envisioning a God of petulance or jealousy.) Of course, it is through the same faith in the jealous God, the Lord of Sabaoth, that we also understand that man is a microcosm as deep and profound as all of creation and that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Who is distracted by things in the sky?

If anyone has been distracted by things up in the sky, it is the sort of loopy, oceanic pseudo-mystics from Tolstoy to Dillard who attach divine meaning to the world even as they take it away from God. A substrate God with Whom we do not relate, Who does not speak, nor demand nor love–this is the God that the sky-gazing, immanentist intellectual wants.

At the risk of being petulant myself, I do sometimes wonder why people read (or write) pseudo-theology of the sort Ms. Dillard seems to be offering. Of the episodes recounted in her book, Publisher’s Weekly says: “each impels us to transform, build, complete and grant divinity to the world.” I guess you could call it neo-paganism, if you wanted to insult real neo-pagans by attributing something this drippy and chthonic to them.