I wish I could speak, with St. Francis of Assisi, of "my brother Sun" so naturally and in such a taken-for-granted manner. Though I am certain that he did not think of the sun as a person able to speak and love, it is equally obvious that he did not treat it as a dead and silent thing saying nothing and signifying less. While I am tempted to treat his Canticle of the Sun as a piece of purely imaginative poetry which has nothing to do with reality, it was otherwise with Francis: though not endowed with intelligence, the sun spoke to Francis; it said to him what it no longer says to me. For him, the sun was alive.

I live in a wordless universe. Yes, I am surrounded by noise, drowning in it at times, but so much of this noise is man-made. Apart from this noise I stay in the midst of soulless objects subject to their impersonal laws, foreign to me and having no interest in what I am about. The sun does not proclaim God to me as it did to Francis, and I am not inclined to invite it to praise God with me.

God too has become remote. No longer does He speak in thunder and lightning and wind and earth and fire as He obviously did to those who composed and sang the psalms of the Old Testament and hymns of the Church. To them, the rays of the sun and raindrops, scorching heat and freezing cold disclosed, shouted at times, God's kindness and care and anger and disapproval. "My" natural phenomena, on the other hand, are just that and no more, lifeless happenings in which inanimate laws are doing "their thing". God is somewhere beyond these laws, letting them run the show. God seems to be absent from human events as well. Events are caused by human beings, by people with their well thought out or chaotic agendas, aware or unaware of what they are up to.

This is terrible, God being absent, God having little to do with what we are doing, God seeming to abandon us to our own devices, God not only letting us grow up but letting us outgrow Him. God who is a stranger to us, and thus a God whom we do not need. Painful thoughts, these, but real thoughts. Thoughts arising not as much out of intellectual curiosity but out of our daily living, out of the way in which we act and react.

But what if Francis' Canticle is not mere poetry? What if this poetry is not "mere" at all but more real than hard-nosed reality? Is there not something very wrong with the notion and image of God which makes us pose all those baffling and awkward questions, questions which seem to be stacked against our faith in Him? Do we not think of our God as a clock-maker who makes his clock, winds it up and then stands back letting it tick away? Do we not imagine our God to be, not true God but a superman who, having made us free, leaves us alone, dependent on nothing but our own brains, a superman refusing to interfere lest he be accused of failing to respect our freedom. Is not the God giving rise to such doubts and problems made in our image and likeness?

The true God makes us free and sustains us in our freedom, remaining intensely present in all our free planning and deciding. Far from destroying His presence enhances our freedom. Our freedom may well consist in being independent of human beings, but it does not consist in our being independent of God. Having been created by Him our freedom depends on Him for its survival and functioning; the more intensely He acts within our freedom the freer we are. When I beg God that a sensitive surgical intervention may be successful, I am not asking Him to take physical hold of the surgeon's fingers, supplanting His own fine touch for that of a human being. I am begging Him rather to be intensely present within the doctor's expertise.