The Mystery of Happiness

How to live a soulful and spiritual life.

Enthusiast (God Within)

God has no hands, feet, or voice except ours

In his book Who Needs God, Rabbi Harold Kusner responds to why God is so hard to find by asking us to rethink the question. Perhaps we are disappointed because we are looking so hard in the wrong place, and perhaps we are taking the task too literally. Kusner alerts us to the view that Psalm 146, for example, which tells us that God secures justice for those who are wronged, gives bread to the hungry, and restores sight to the blind, is not really a description of how God spends His time. Rather, if we concentrate on the context of each sentence, we can recognize that securing justice is a divine act, a manifestation of spiritual presence in human activity, whether the acts of service are feeding the hungry, supporting the poor, or comforting the sick and the lonely. In short, "They are not things that God does; they are things that we do." Similarly the sixteenth-century Catholic mystic Teresa of Avila said, "God has no hands or feet or voice except ours and through these he works."

It follows that an atheist is not a person who says, "God has no meaning for me," but one who is really saying that the poor and the hungry, or working for justice, have no meaning for him. The atheist, then, is not the person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being but the one who does not honor the value of love, courage, honesty and compassion.

T. Byram Karasu, MD is the author of The Art of Serenity



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T. Byram Karasu, M.D., is Silverman Professor of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein. He is the author of many books including The Art of Serenity.

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