By: Feride Güney

A spider asks a fly caught in its web:

“Is the God you beg to save you the same God I thank for my lunch?”

Sometimes a person falls silent for a long time before a very small sentence.

Because while one pleads with the same God for deliverance, another gives thanks for what they have received.

When it rains, a farmer looks up at the sky in gratitude, while someone whose wedding has been ruined may curse that same sky. In a war, both sides pray for victory. What one person longs to have may be what another longs to escape.

What, then, is the thing we call a miracle?

Perhaps, very often, it is simply a matter of which side of an event we are standing on.

If the fly escapes, its prayer will have been answered; the spider will go hungry. If the spider eats the fly, the spider will give thanks; the fly’s prayer will remain in silence.

For centuries, too, human beings have looked up at the sky when good things happen and said, “He saw me,” and asked, when bad things happen, “Why did he not see me?”

But perhaps the more unsettling question is this:

At the moment we believe we have been seen, do we ever think about who is on the other side of the web?

Because life is not made up only of flies and spiders.

Sometimes we are the fly.

Sometimes we are the spider.

And most of the time, whichever we imagine ourselves to be, we imagine God to be on that side, too.
Perhaps some of the things people say about God describe not God, but where they are standing in the web.

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Feride Güney is a Kurdish writer based in Ankara, Türkiye. Her writing explores memory, grief, womanhood, belonging, and the contradictions of everyday life.