"When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second, but not the rest of the time."  So remarked recent Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich.  A writer who has devoted her career to presenting people's life stories as seeming works of fiction, Alexievich understands well the difficulty of believing in God all the time.  In the face of what she has witnessed in her life behind the Iron Curtain, it's easy to see how God appears elusive:  where could he be in oppression?
     Yet Alexievich also understands how powerfully a single point of natural wonder tends to point us to God.  Theologians call this natural revelation, the idea that God speaks and expresses himself in what he has made, revelation that everyone can see.  Challenging this, however, is the idea that such revelation is in many ways an inference; that is, one must step up a level from the experience to consider that a God may be within it.
     This is the central imperative of faith in times of political darkness and oppression: we must step beyond what we can see.  For a Westerner, this may be easier, of course, but given the universality of the natural world, its possibility lies before us all.