WHERE IS GOD by Peter J. Gustin

Imagine for a moment that you are an ant. A tiny black ant living in a colony with thousands and thousands of your very best friends. Try, if you can, to understand that the consciousness of an ant is nothing like that of the consciousness of a human being. In fact, as an ant, your “friends” aren’t really your friends at all. Even the way you communicate could hardly be considered communication by humn standards. Other ants are born. Other ants die. It doesn’t to affect you one way or the other. In fact, nothing affects you; at least not in the way that it would if you were a human.

Your colony and the short traversable distance beyond it are you entire world. You’re born, you eat, you breed, you sleep and then you die. Never once knowing that there was more to the universe beyond what you saw, sensed, touched and tasted.

Once upon a time as a tiny little ant, the entrance to your home was blocked. The nice, neat hole that your forefathers dug so that you could get in and out of your house was suddenly destroyed. If you had just a little more brain power than you actually do, you might consider it to be an act of God….or maybe just a natural disaster. In a different state of consciousness, with a slightly more advanced brain, you might have noticed the gigantic human child stomping on the doorway to your home. But even then, you’d probably have no idea what it was that you were seeing, even though it was right there in front of you.

A few months later, you and another ant were out looking for food. Though neither of you spoke a word to each other, you somehow knew that it was time to seek sustenance and that you were going to do it together. Suddenly, you feel a slight increase in temperate and as you scurry away from the heat and sudden blinding light, your travel companion bursts into flames and is no more. You, as an ant, know nothing of the boy and his magnifier than lurk over you, so many times larger than you are, that it is simply beyond your capabilities to understand. All you know is that there is danger and you need to get home…fast.

The hamster spinning on his wheel knows not where the pellets that he eats come from. He doesn’t understand that you wake up early every day, shower, shave then hurry off to work. He doesn’t understand your office politics nor does he even know what you do. In fact, “do” is a concept beyond him entirely. It is of no consequence nor is it within any level of his comprehension that what you “do” actually provides you with enough barter (also known as money) so that you can head to the store and purchase his pellets so that he will have something to eat.

In the consciousness of a hamster, the food is simply there. Ready to eat whenever the urge strikes him. If the food were not there one day, the hamster would not wonder if you had forgotten about him. He would not think that maybe you had overslept nor would he fear that maybe you’d been kidnapped by two lunatics hoping to extort your wealthy parents for a few extra bucks so that they could score their next high. The hungry little hamster probably wouldn’t think about you at all. Instead, he’d just lie back down and take a nap…a little hungrier than usual.

But let’s say you had been laid off. Say that those checks had stopped coming in. Imaging you’ve got 3 little children of your own and a sickly mother in law; all of whom need food for their bellies and heat in the house. Say that money is far too scarce to spend on pellets for a cute little hamster. You could try and try and try again to explain to the little hamster that he’d be moving to another home; somewhere nice with a little girl who would love him and take care of him far better than you ever could. You could speak the words, draw a picture or even try to act it out. But no matter what you did, not only would the hamster never understand, but he’d probably never really even know that you were there

As people, we tend to think that we’re pretty smart. We think, we dream, we build, we talk, we explore, we explain, we write, we grow, we sing, we make and we also destroy.

We point our telescopes to outer space. We sink our submarines to the bottom of the sea. We look through our microscopes and when we do our calculations and and add everything up, we think we know.

But think about the little hamster who knows every single square inch of his cage. Think how smart he must have felt when he realized that pushing on the big blue lever yielded him yet another heaping belly full of food from the large plastic box. And what about the little ant that found his way into the hamster cage one day? He didn’t even know that the big blue lever was there at all.

So who’s to say that the food we grow or the air we breathe isn’t coming from somewhere so vastly beyond our understanding that we can’t even see it, though we might be looking right at it. Are the planets talking? Does Jupiter envy the pets that Earth keeps? Is the vast emptiness of space trying desperately to tell us that over-population is going to cause some serious problems for us in the future?

A little boy goes to feed his cat, and while taking a step towards the food dish, he kicks over the water dish. An “accident” from the perspective of the boy. A “tsunami”, unlooked for from the perspective of the cat; if the cat even had the mind to consider such a thing.

We as human beings assume that we are the smartest things in our known realm. Maybe we’re the smartest things in our solar system or maybe even the entire universe. Maybe there is a God. Maybe He is real. Even if that were the case, we are just as unlikely to find Him as the ant is to look up and say

“Hey, kid, stop chasing me!”, even if only in his mind.

Maybe God cares for us as intensely as a young boy would care for his his first puppy dog. Maybe He created our world like we accidentally make a home for termites when we leave our shed to rot in the back yard. Whether He is involved with our everyday life or off at work with the other “Gods”just trying to make ends meat, we will never ever know.

Maybe not until the very end.

As a sickly old cat lays down on the couch, struggling to take in every last breath, a mother of two and wife to a man, sits down next to him and begins stroking his back. She was only eleven years old when her parents got her the cat and she’s loved him ever since. Knowing now that the end is likely near for her beloved pet, she puts her face to his soft, heaving side and tells him she loves him. In that moment, for one fleeing instant, just before the end, the old cat knows that the woman is there and knows he’s been loved every day of his life.