Prelude

The teenager sits in tears among the sand dunes and watches the sun rise from behind the mountains; sensitized by grief for her younger brother who'd recently died from Hodgkin's disease, she's touched by awareness of God's presence in loss. Another woman reflects, ‘I would sit for hours, gazing at the outline of the great Andes mountains, which came into vision and then disappeared as the clouds moved across the sky. I think that these mountains spoke to me even more powerfully of God than does the sea; for their appearance and disappearance mirrored my experience of the felt presence and absence of the Divine.’

The atheist demands evidence of God's existence; the agnostic acknowledges the ambiguity of everything; one believer points to supposed acts of God, while another sees God present in the ordinariness of everything.

Victims of torture describe their darkest moments as being when they felt deeply alone, bereft of even God, despairing because God, whether through powerlessness or implicit permission, allowed the torture to continue; yet many, many times victims, often the very same persons, have spoken of how they knew, deeply knew, that God was with them: an experience of God’s absence and presence which mirrors that of Jesus on the cross – ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’; ‘Father, into Thy hands I commit my spirit.’