In her book “Traveling Mercies: Thoughts on Faith,” the writer Anne Lamott repeats a story that she calls old but is new to me. It centers on a rugged individualist who gets drunk at a bar someplace in Alaska.

“He’s telling the bartender how he recently lost whatever faith he’d had after his twin-engine place crashed in the tundra.

“‘Yeah, he says bitterly. I lay there in the wreckage, hour after hour, nearly frozen to death, crying out for God to save me, praying for help with every ounce of my being, but he didn’t raise a finger to help.’ .  .  .

‘But,’ said the bartender, squinting an eye at him, ‘you’re here. You were saved.’

‘Yeah, that’s right said the man. ‘Because finally some goddamn Eskimo came along.’”

The punch in this story, as I reflect on it, comes in the way the fellow misses the point altogether. His ugly expletive about the person who rescued him, betraying racial prejudice as it does, gives further emphasis to the man’s obtuseness.

The point, of course, is that God did answer his prayers for help. The God to whom he turned for rescue from the ruins of his plane responded appropriately. But the injured man was spiritually so dumb as to miss the hand of God in his release from a life-threatening predicament.

In some ways the story evokes the parable of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament. There St. Luke tells of a man lying wounded on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. The similarity comes in that the rescuer of this man, too, was of a racial identity normally unacceptable to the man saved. In the Gospel story, however, there is no indication the man lying in the road fails to recognize the hand of God in his rescue.

The other chief point in the Alaskan story goes beyond the fact of God’s response. It lies in how God answered the pilot of the crashed plane. God responded to the man’s pleas for help, not by anything heavenly, but by the arrival on the scene of another human being.

What kind of answer the man expected is not clear; he seems to have wanted some kind of divine apparition. He apparently imagined God would somehow physically lift him out of the plane wreck and take him away from the open tundra to a safe place.

Many spiritually sensitive people are accustomed to recognize the actions of God in the way other people  reach out to them. Especially in their times of need, when grief and distress threaten to overwhelm them and they need help, they find in the concern of others something of God’s own compassion.

Those who write letters of condolence to us when someone dear has died, for instance, may be offering us help in which we can find God. When I receive such notes from friends, I discover in them human emotion that can be taken to express something of God’s own sympathy.

Similarly, when other people hug and kiss us at times of such loss, we can feel a divine embrace. Even though we may not do so explicitly, we may still experience something that goes beyond the merely human.

In such instances, I guess you can say I allow another person to be an Eskimo for me. At least, that is the way Anne Lamott might express it as she applies the point of the story to everyday life.

Rather than looking for God in heaven, it perhaps makes more sense to detect God’s presence on earth. And instead of expecting the divine to appear in revelations or miracles, maybe we can find the divine in the actions of the people who fill our days.

“Finding God in all things” is a motto dear to Ignatius of Loyola, the saint who founded the Jesuit society in the Catholic Church. I continue to cherish this spiritual ideal of my tradition, even though it’s impossible to fulfill.

I’m sure Ignatius would allow me to amend his spiritual slogan to say finding God “in all people.” He must have intended that already but making it explicit helps clarify the point about other persons as contacts with the divine. It can be spiritually uplifting to let them be Eskimos to us.

Richard Griffin