“Where are you?” A question that can take many forms.
“Where are you in this world of yours?”
“Where are you in this church of yours?
“Where are you in this life of yours?
“Where are you?” God asks Adam, hiding and fearful in his nakedness. It’s a question asked, not from judgment or in anger, but from love and concern. A merciful God speaks.
When God asks Adam and Eve “Where are you?” the sentence of death for eating the forbidden fruit was already being being carried out. The two do not die physically immediately. The scriptures say they live on for hundreds of years. But now they’re uneasy, hiding in the garden where they experienced such full life and moved so freely before.
The healthy relationship with the created world the garden symbolizes is no more. Their relationship with each other has changed. They blame each other. “The woman made me do it.” Their relationship with the animal world is broken; they’re betrayed by the wisest of animals, the snake.
The earth itself that gave them abundant food and drink and offered its delightful beauty, becomes hard and unyielding. The first physical death recorded in Genesis is the murder of Abel by his brother Cain.
When God asks “Where are you?” death has already entered the world. God is not carrying out a sentence. God comes with love and kindness to the creatures made in his image.
God fashions garments of skin for Adam and Eve as they are driven out of the garden. God promises a woman, a new Eve, a mother of all the living. As the Jewish scribes fashioned the ancient creation stories into the Book of Genesis, they end it with God’s call and promise to Abraham. A new people will bring life to the world. A merciful God does not abandon the world he made.
“Where are we in this world of ours?” The question asked in Genesis is still asked of us today.
The Victor's Place 
May you be blessed as you give inspiration to Retreatants with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
You have posed good questions. Some may not have immediate answers. Then we need to live the questions daily until the answers are revealed. As Rainer Maria Rilke said:
“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
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I’m going to use that quote, Liz. Thanks
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Here’s the link to Rilke quote: http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=747
Sadly his life ended with leukemia and on his deathbed he refused a priestly visit. He never seemed to resolve his concept or misconception of God.
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Rilke loved art: The Last Supper
They are assembled, astonished and disturbed
round him, who like a sage resolved his fate,
and now leaves those to whom he most belonged,
leaving and passing by them like a stranger.
The loneliness of old comes over him
which helped mature him for his deepest acts;
now will he once again walk through the olive grove,
and those who love him still will flee before his sight.
To this last supper he has summoned them,
and (like a shot that scatters birds from trees)
their hands draw back from reaching for the loaves
upon his word: they fly across to him;
they flutter, frightened, round the supper table
searching for an escape. But he is present
everywhere like an all-pervading twilight-hour.
[On seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper”, Milan 1904.]
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-last-supper/
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