Is God Watching Us from a Distance?
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Commentary by Walter Hesford | FāVS News
I’ve long been haunted by Nanci Griffith’s 1987 rendition of Julie Gold’s 1985 song, “From a Distance.” I listened to it again on a recent drive back from Seattle, so I decided to ponder the song’s lyrics and wrestle with its repeated assertion that “God is watching us from a distance.”
Does the song consider this watching a good thing? Do I? Is God watching us from a distance?
The title, “From a Distance,” surprises me because I am used to the assertion of popular hymns that God is close to us, walking with us, holding our hand. It seems a bit scary to have a God who just watches from a distance. Is this deity like Big Brother of George Orwell’s “1984,” who watches over an oppressed society?
The answer to this question is “no,” judging by the complete lyrics of Gold’s song. Rather, the God of this song watches over an ideal world of peace and harmony.
The Lyrics
The opening line of the song, “From a distance the world looks blue and green,” is reminiscent of early astronauts’ distant view of, and wish for, an environmentally and socially harmonious world. The closing lines of the first stanza, which are repeated with some variation in the second and third stanza, posit that “From a distance there is harmony / And it echoes through the land. / It’s the voice of hope, it’s the voice of peace, / It’s the voice of everyman.”
The second stanza offers a vision of a world where “no one is in need,” where there are “no guns, no bombs /… no hungry mouths to feed.” This sounds rather like the world envisioned in John Lennon’s 1971 “Imagine,” except in Lennon’s song the lack of belief in a God is stressed, whereas in this song, that “God is watching us, God is watching us, God is watching us from a distance” is stressed.
With God watching us, the song’s third stanza proclaims, we see our war-time enemies as our friends. We can’t understand why we were fighting and harmony prevails. “It’s the hope of hopes, it’s the love of love, / It’s the heart of everyman.”
What Do Other Cultures Believe?
Is the God-at-a-distance just a projection of what it’s in our hearts? Is it just wishful thinking? Does this wishful thinking cater to a false cosmic optimism that makes us indifferent to human suffering?
It could, but it need not. Many cultures have valued a transcendent distant power which looks over our welfare and upholds truth and justice. This power offers an alternative to the narrow concerns of politicians and ego-centric individuals.
In ancient China, it was held that “Tian” (Heaven), the site of law and order, watched over the land and its rulers. If the emperor was not virtuous, he would lose the Mandate of Heaven, and thus the right to rule.
In ancient Israel, God was seen as residing in a heaven above the heavens he created, and watching us from this distance: “The LORD looks down from heaven; he sees all mankind. From where he sits enthroned he watches all the inhabitants of the earth” (Psalm 33: 13-14, NRSV).
Jesus shares this view, teaching his disciples to pray to “Our Father in heaven,” asking that “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6: 9-10, NRSV). In “kingdom of heaven” parables, Jesus suggests that if the kingdom of heaven were to come to earth, all would have a home (Matthew 13:31-32) and there would be food for all (Matthew 13:33). Jesus’ kingdom of heaven provided a critique of and an alternative to the Roman Empire.
God’s Harmonious World ‘In the Heart of Everyman’
The concept of God literally residing in a heaven above is of course based on an outmoded cosmology. Yet the post-Copernican (and post-Unitarian) Henry David Thoreau felt compelled in “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) to evoke a transcendent God-of-justice who sides with his individualistic defiance of the unjust laws of the U.S., which upheld slavery.
Any individual, any nation, could evoke a God-at-a-distance who sides with them. Gold’s “At a Distance” guards against the danger that her watching God will be called upon to support a narrow agenda by having this God’s harmonious world embedded “in the heart of everyman.”
I really can’t answer the question, “Is God watching us from a distance?” It’s a matter of faith. Whatever our faith, we can be thankful for songwriters like Gold and singers like Griffith who give us much to ponder.
I agree with your conclusion. Every time I hear that song, I’m reminded of Deists who see God as the aloof Creator. I also have difficulty with the intially contradictory concept between Y’shua’s Lord’s Prayer (Our Father which art in heaven—Matthew 6:9) and Solomon’s prayer of dedication of the temple: (Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house which I have built– 1Kings 8:27) The former speaks of a God seated within and the latter a God that cannot be confined within. If God is contained within heaven, then that’s yet another strike against Anselm’s Ontological Argument that asks whether we can “imagine a being greater than which there is no other.” God as an ontic-ontological being would not be dimensionally greater than a purely ontic universe of His creation if we must conceive Him of being contained thereby.
But even that misses the point of greatness with God. I pondered whether God sees through the eyes of the oppressed. While I found many verses of the Bible that say that He searches hearts and minds, thereby being the dayan emet (true judge), I found nothing that says that seeing through the eyes of the oppressed or anyone else was something that God continually does. And in Habakkuk 1:3 we read, “Thou art of purer eyes than to behond evil and canst not look upon iniquity,” a strange statement for the One who created evil in the first place (Isaiah 45:7). However, from a Biocentric view, whatever enters the eyes of oppressed sentient beings does come to the knowledge of a universe becoming self-aware, and at its fullness creates itself, not just in the future, but also in the beginning. Is this God? A phlosopher might be tempted to think so. But if the universe knows, how can its Creator not know?