Night And Silence, Who Is Here?

Oberon in A Midsummer's Night's Dream; One of the Chatty Gods

We wrote on God and Silence vs. Chit-Chat on a previous post: http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2017/03/why-do-bad-things-happen-to-good-people.html
and we continue here.

I believe the following to be an excellent example of talking to God or intuiting the mind of God; i.e., knowing what is going on in God's mind:

The Guardian
Rex Tillerson: 'I didn't want this job … my wife told me I'm supposed to do this'
Secretary of state said he had not met Donald Trump before he was summoned to Trump Tower to discuss ‘the world’ and was offered the role
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/22/rex-tillerson-i-didnt-want-this-job

... “I didn’t want this job. I didn’t seek this job,” Tillerson told the Independent Journal Review (IJR), in an interview conducted on his official plane during the three-nation Asia trip. “My wife told me I’m supposed to do this.”

He said he had not met Donald Trump before being summoned to Trump Tower after the surprise election victory, ostensibly to talk to the president-elect “about the world” and his experiences as an oil company CEO.

“When he asked me at the end of that conversation to be secretary of state, I was stunned,” he said, adding that at 65 years old, at the end of a four-decade career at ExxonMobil, he had expected to retire: “I was going to go to the ranch to be with my grandkids.”

However, he said that when he returned to his Texas home after meeting Trump in New York, his wife, Renda St Clair, shook her finger in his face and said: “I told you God’s not through with you.”

He said he now feels his wife had been right: “I’m supposed to do this.”

The Tillersons know the mind of God.

They know the mind of that god who talks, gossips, and lets his covert meanings be known to the faithful by his body language and gestures.
The poor and the suffering wonder why that god is so silent.

Make up your minds: is God silent or chatty? How easy is it to engage Him in conversation? It is how you define the spiritual aspects of the world, so it may indeed be an important question.

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Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?

The painting is part of a mural by Thomas Hart Benton and depicts the movie industry in America. The film industry has absolutely nothing - Nothing! - to do with this post. However, yesterday I was thinking about something my friend in the film industry said and I had a sudden enlightenment of the Sunset-Boulevard-type  { "Lights! Camera!.... All right, Mr. DeMille. I'm ready for my enlightenment!"}, and this is how I remember things as they all come together like rushes from weeks and months of shooting film and trying now to edit it into something coherent.

There were a lot of important words in that paragraph, but I won't talk about them now. Now I have to talk about things that occurred to me while I was running this morning.

The question posed in the title, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" is but another form of the question whether God is silent or loquacious.
When things are going our way, I notice that people tend to believe God is loquacious: He is telling us the right road to take, the right course to major in, the right investments for our money, and we frequently find ourselves in the end-zone and dropping to one knee with hosannas on our lips.

When we suffer, God seems silent, on holiday, like your lawyer who won't return your calls while the lawyers of the enemy have nothing else to do but badger you, yet is everyday chatter, when we are bubbly and happy, when all we have to do is turn on the cable TV and get a few doses of God's advice to everyone from the lovelorn to the politically inept.

In Martin Scorsese's film Silence there is long meditation on divine silence.

So which one is it?

(I believe it is both; it is a superposition of states.)

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