This also connects with a comment made by Richard Dawkins in the recent movie/documentary “Expelled.” Toward the end of the film Ben Stein poses to Dawkins the question, “What if after this you die and there is a God and He says to you, ‘Richard, what were you doing? Look at all I did for you.’ What would you say?” Dawkins recollected that Bertrand Russell had answered a similar question by saying that he would say to God, “Why did you hide yourself?” Caravaggio forces us to examine the epistemological lenses we use to spot God’s activity in the world at large and in our own particular lives. How easily I adopt a certain myopia that is simply blind to God’s presence and activity if it does not register on some kind of straightforward, blatent fashion.

“The discernment of the divine is thus not made an easy business in Caravaggio’s hands. There is no paean of the unmistakability of divine action in human life. God’s self-disclosure – his saving power and action – does not take a form that can clearly be differentiated from other objects and actions and pointed to in straightforward distinction from them. It has to be discerned in the irreducible interactions of people with each other and with their material environment.”

Caravaggio is on my desktop as a reminder to see God in the subtle.