Last weekend, I went camping.  The weather was typical October in the Midwest: crisp, windy, spotty rain, afternoon and morning sun.  The leaves were turning, the squirrels busy hunting, the clouds looking like mountains when the sun rose over them.  As I walked through the forest and gazed at the rock formations rising over them, or as I looked at the evening's stars, I thought often of the terrible complexity of believing in God in such a wonderful world.
     Genesis tells us that after he created it, God called the world good.  He called Adam and Eve good, too.  Many years later, however, he came to regret placing humanity in this world.  Noah knew this well.  Yet many, many more years after the Flood, God set himself into the world, subjecting himself to the full gamut of its vagaries and machinations.  In Jesus, he became a human being.
     In the present moment, however, we do not see God, physically, in the creation.  We do not see God, physically, in the wonder and beauty, and we do not see God, physically, in the turmoil and pain that unfortunately run through it.  We gasp at the joy life brings, we weep over the suffering it engenders.  And we do not see God, physically, in either one.
     But we believe.  Believing is a terrible complexity because it is a complexity that frightens as well as comforts, undermines as much as it upholds, a faith in, as Hebrews 11:1 puts it, the hoped for and unseen.  It sets tension at the heart of existence.  Faith is complicated.  Life is complicated, too.  And so is God.  That is why we keep going, whether we believe or not:  we know that what we see, physically, is more than what we think, materially, it is.
     As Island of Knowledge:  The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning, a recently published book by an astronomer who teaches at Dartmouth College, remarks, there are things that even the best science will never fully see.  We walk in a shadow, a terribly complex shadow woven with knowledge and belief, belief that frightens, belief that overwhelms, yet belief that opens the door of what we do not--and cannot--know.