The wings of refuge [antikvár]

Introduction Providence? 'It's evening, and it's dark, and I'm afraid.' So says the judge to the priest in Bergman's film The Rite, crying into the unknown the fear, the silence and the lonehness of a great deal of our broken twentieth-century world. In another of his films, The Seventh Seal, one of the characters, searching, maybe, for a clue to the meaning of some of the questions and uncertainties of life, and of death, says, 'We make an idol of our fear, and call it God.' Bergman's voice, from the uncertainty and dread of life lived only from within the perspective of this natural order, or at least from a perspective within which the question 'Where are you, God?' never seems to bring a reply, is speaking for many others in whom a living faith in God, and in his gracious interaction with his world, has been extinguished. Their eyes see only the flow and counter-flow of events and experiences; their minds can discern no pattern or meaning; and they have lost hold of, or have never reached out to grasp, the hand of the unseen God who rules all, plans all, and whose purposes give meaning to history both on world and on individual levels. By contrast, faith in the providence of God (the general name that Christians have given to God's present activity in the world) is very much alive in the main characters, and in the unknown author, of the little book of Ruth. The story is set 'in the days when the judges ruled',' days when, as we shall see, faith in God was threatened by much that was 'dark' and 'fear-making'. But even in a context in which faith was challenged, our author urges upon his readers — upon us - a certainty, and delight, in the security of God's providence. ' Ruth 1:1 (literally: 'when the judges judged ). 11