c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of RNS and author of”Turn Toward the Wind.”)

UNDATED _ God is news.

From Self magazine to The New York Times to the evening news, God has grabbed headlines and spirituality has been pronounced a”trend.” At first, most media tried to ignore the recent references. Seven babies born to a couple in Iowa was news. The fact that they kept bringing God into the story was initially met with polite dismissal, then treated as quaint.

Yet the McCaughey family simply and stubbornly talked about God whenever they talked about their babies.

Then there was the tragedy in Kentucky, where three girls were shot during an informal prayer session at school.

The teen-ager who had talked the shooter out of his gun spoke quietly of God making bad things work for good. The boy who admitted to doing the shooting was treated less with anger than forgiveness. His sister was embraced and sang at the girls’ funeral. And always there was talk of God.

Recently, The New York Times Magazine speculated that all this God-talk may signal a religious revival in what has already been called the most religious country in the world. It then went on to picture the range of religious expression in America, from Indian mystics to charismatic Christians.

As I sat reading the magazine, I began to wonder what God must think of all this attention.

Is he pleased that we’ve finally noticed? Perplexed by our corporate ignorance? Or might he even be annoyed with us for trying to make him another celebrity in a line up that includes rock bands and serial killers?

The big problem is that God is love, according to the Bible, and love has a hard time being accepted as”news.” Hatred, violence and dissent make news. But love is complicated, ethereal and downright”soft”in media terms. It’s hard to find sound bites or headlines that tell the story in a few words, especially when we’re not talking about the romantic love of pop lyrics.

How do you explain the incredible belief of a family who chose to move forward with a pregnancy they were told would be risky or even tragic? Had one or two babies died they would have had none of the media attention and little of the economic support.

The McCaugheys did not place their belief in the news. They believed in a God of love.

And what of the people of West Paducah, Ky.? How can they spend so little energy on anger or hatred and so much on pointing to the true nature of God? It’s a story that defies human comprehension.

My own view of God is obviously inadequate, but I still think of God the father in masculine terms and extrapolate the humor of my own father to the Big Daddy.

And so I think God might be tickled by all the attention, laughing and slapping his knee (if he has knees) at the foolish ways we try to make sense of him.

After all, Christians believe that God went to the cosmic trouble of sending his own son to Earth to show his love for humanity. He could have waited a few thousand years and bought a chain of newspapers or pre-empted broadcasts for a week or two with the news. Surely that would have been more efficient.

But instead he entered history at a particularly messy time, sent a child to a group of people who had little status and provided little opportunity for mass dissemination of the word. By human standards that seems foolish.

Christians also believe the Incarnation is important because God actually allowed himself to experience what it means to be human in every way except sin. He has an understanding of our desire to explain things in the simplest terms and our need to rationalize the most mystical elements of life.

God knows all this about us, yet he allows us to stumble along, every now and then”discovering”him, before we get tangled up again in our human endeavors.

So it probably doesn’t surprise God to see himself on the cover of magazines. Perhaps he feels like a movie star who reads about himself in a fantastic tabloid story, only to then mutter:”Well, that’s an interesting take on it.” But I can’t help thinking that God is pleased when he hears the simple message of thanks from the family in Iowa or the awesome grace and hope from the people in Kentucky. Even without the megaphone of the media, these people know who God is. And they know he is not news.

MJP END BOURKE