Where Was God?

The God of peace is never glorified by human violence. — TRAPPIST MONK THOMAS MERTON

If your God is God the Puppeteer or God the Supreme Scorekeeper or God the Most High Beancounter, do yourself a favor right now and turn to someone else for comfort and advice.

Find the so-called reverend Jerry Falwell on television or in cyberspace and resonate to the calls he has made all last week for vengeance at any cost.

For that matter, find what’s left of the God-invoking madmen who plunged all of us into this nightmare in the first place. They have twisted and perverted their God — Mohammed’s Allah of perfect love — into the all-time meanest, black-hearted, petty tyrant that ever came along.

Like their Christian counterparts who kill to save the unborn, they have warped their ancient prophet’s allegiance to peace and turned their own sacred texts inside out. They have transformed “jihad” from a holy struggle to do and defend God’s will for good into a heinous and egomaniacal excuse for mass murder.

If God seems to be missing in action this week, it’s because we always look for God in the wrong place:

Up, instead of in our neighbors’ eyes. Under the dome of a cathedral or synagogue, instead of in a mirror.

If the God you say you believe in is bigger than a terrorist’s Exterminator God, I can tell you some of the places in which your God was highly visible last week. And if your God responded -- not with vengeance but with loving forgiveness — to the torture and crucifixion of the very son sent to lead the way to paradise, I can tell you, absolutely, where your God was not.

God was in those furtive phone calls made by the doomed passengers on four United and American airlines flights. Given only a few precious, last moments, every one of them used the time to tell another human being, “I love you.”

God was at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., the day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There, at a press conference, leaders of the American Muslim Political Coordination Council asked fellow Muslims in the United States to donate blood for victims.

Made sudden targets of suspicion and retaliatory violence by zealots who have profaned the great Islamic faith, these Muslims — these American citizens — embodied a truth that Christian mystic Meister Eckhart shared with the world in the 13th century:

“Whatever God does, the first outburst is always compassion.”

Conversely, on the same night, God was not with some 300 Old Glory-waving people in the Chicago suburb of Bridgeview when police had to stop them from marching on a mosque. God was not with the cowards in Irving, Tex., who sprayed the windows of an Islamic center with bullets. God was not with the adults in Santa Clara, Calif., who lay on their horns and shouted obscenities at a school for 400 Islamic grade school children.

Most assuredly, God was not in the front-page headlines of the sorry San Francisco Examiner, which screamed, “Bastards!” one day and “Who did this? When will they pay?” the next.

If there was love in it, light in it, God was there.

If the inherent value of one person — let alone a country — was discounted or dismissed, God was ignored.

If the vow or plan involved murder, it was not God’s. If the means required humiliation, the end was not justified to God.

Whether it occurred in the volcanic rubble of lower Manhattan, the scorched walls of Arlington, Va., or in any of 281 million American hearts, if suffering was shared, tears were wiped or solace was offered, God was there.

Wherever people fought hard against the very human reflex of anger and the desire for revenge, God joined their fight. Wherever they practiced the wisdom of First Letter of John, 4:18 — “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” — the stifling they felt in their souls was God.

Stephanie Salter

Stephanie Salter’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. E-mail her at salter@sfchronicle.com