"I brought a friend to my Anglican church and she objected to how our liturgy contained (in her words) 'other people's prayers.' She felt that prayer should be an original expression of one's own thoughts, feelings, and needs. But over a lifetime the ardor of our belief will wax and wane. This is a normal part of the Christian life. Inherited prayers and practices of the church tether us to belief, far more securely than our own vacillating perspective or self-expression" (16).
"When we pray the prayers we've been given by the church--the prayers of the psalmist and the saints, the Lord's prayer, the Daily Office-- we pray beyond what we can know, believe, or drum up in ourselves. 'Other people's prayers' discipled me; they taught me how to believe again.... We come to God with our little belief, however fleeting and feeble, and in prayer we are taught to walk more deeply into truth" (17).
"Theodicy is not merely a cold philosophical conundrum. It is the engine of our grimmest doubts. It can sometimes wither belief altogether. A recent survey showed that the most commonly stated reason for unbelief among Millennials and Gen Z-ers was that they 'have a hard time believing that a good God would allow so much evil and suffering in the world'" (23).
"If there is no one to keep watch with us, no who we can trust to look out for us in the night, then anything that happens, however good or bad, is sheer chaos, chance, and biological accident. But belief in a transcendent God means we are stuck with the problem of pain. So there are libraries of books seeking to answer the question of theodicy--responses and solutions offered by the hundreds, many of them good and wise.
"Yet despite all the ink spilled, we are not satisfied. Our questions persist.
"Because ultimately theodicy is not a cosmic algebra question, where we can simply solve for x. It is almost primordial. A scream. An ache. A protest from the depths of the human heart.
"Where are you, oh God? Is anyone watching out for us? Does anyone see? And tell us why! WHy this evil, this heartbreak, this suffering?
"I have come to see theodicy as an existential knife-fight between the reality of our own quaking vulnerability and our hope for a God who can be trusted.
"At the end of the day--in my case, literally the darkness of the night--the problem of theodicy cannot be answered. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, it is not 'a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.'
"We sometimes talk about mystery as if it's a code to crack--as if the full sweep of knowledge is available to us, but we just haven't sussed it out yet. But true mystery invokes things that are fundamentally beyond our grasp. Mystery is an encounter with an unsearchable reality, an acknowledgement that the world crackles with possibility because it is steeped in the shocking and unpredictable presence of God. Avery Cardinal Dulles wrote that mysteries are 'not fully intelligible to the finite mind,' but that the reason for this is 'not the poverty but the richness' of the mystery.
"One reason the problem of suffering cannot be answered tidily is that pain and brokenness are, at their roots, anti-rational. Christians understand evil and suffering to be forces of 'anti-creation.' They don't fit in the realm of reason and order because they frustrate reason and disintegrate order. If there was a neat rationale for pain, it would necessarily fit somewhere in the order of the cosmos, an essential part of reality. But the early church's understanding of suffering and evil was that they were an absurd and inexplicable abnormality, a gross absence of the good and true.
"But secondly, and much more importantly, the problem of pain can't be adequately answered because we don't primarily want an answer. When all is said and done, we don't want God to simply explain himself, to give an account of how hurricanes or head colds fit into his overall redemptive plan. We want action. We want to see things made right.
"At its heart, theodicy is the longing for a God who notices our suffering, who cares enough to act, and who will make all things new. It is an ache that cannot be shaken, which we all share deep in our bones and carry with use very day--and every night" (24-26).
"Francis Spufford writes, 'We don't have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story.'
"If there is anything remotely approaching a Christian answer to our questions about theodicy, the story is the answer" (29).
"The story we live by is one that we somehow enter into--we discover our own small lives and stories in the larger story of God and his church.
"We do that through practices and prayers we receive from those who have gone before us. We take up and learn the craft of faith that allows us to know an actual, surprising, frustrating, and relentlessly merciful God. In the present tense" (30).
"God is good an powerful, and terrible things regularly happen in the world.
"The church has always known this paradox, but instead of resolving its tension, it has let it persist. We have left this chord humming in dissonance for thousands of years, always believing that it will only be resolved when God himself sounds the final consonant note.
"My deepest question, Where is God in all this? is an ache that I hope to endure until my longing meets its end I want justice; I want resurrection; I want wholeness, wellness, and restoration. And I won't be fully satisfied until God--before whose face our questions die away--sets every last thing right" (27).
"If the question of whether God is real or not--or or whether God is kind or indifferent or a bastard--is determined solely by the balance of joy and sorrow in our own lives or in the world, we will never be able to say anything about who God is or what God is like. The evidence is frankly inconclusive... For every breathtaking splash of a whale's breach, I raise you a forest fire obliterating acre after acre. For every monarch migration, I raise you ticks spreading Lyme disease. For every mother enraptured by her child's first smile, there is another mother whose newborn struggles for his final breath. For every inspiring act of human goodness, there is another person scheming against the weak. In all our lives, from the happiest to the most tragic, the circumstantial evidence for God's goodness is divided. There is beauty and there is horror" (28).
"Spufford writes that, ultimately, 'we don't ask for a creator who can explain himself. We ask for a friend in time of grief, a true judge in times of perplexity, a wider hope than we can manage in time of despair.' If we suffer deeply, he says, there is no explanation, no reason, no answer that can ease our heart-break. 'The only comfort that can do anything--and probably the most it can do is help you endure, or if you cannot endure to fail and fold without wholly hating yourself--is the comfort of feeling yourself loved'" (33).
"Feeling sadness is the cost of being emotionally alive. It's the cost, even, of holiness" (41).
"If we do not make time for grief, it will not simply disappear. Grief is stubborn. It will make itself heard of we will die trying to silence it. If we don't face it directly it comes out sideways, in ways that aren't always recognizable as grief: explosive anger, uncontrollable anxiety, compulsive shallowness, brooding bitterness, unchecked addiction. Grief is a ghost that cannot be put to rest until it's purpose has been fulfilled" (43).
"The Christian response to a culture of outrage must not be to mimic or perpetuate it, but we also cannot simply condemn outrage in favor of some pure form of enlightened logic that denies emotion altogether. There is, truly, plenty to be upset about, plenty of loss to mourn, plenty to lament. The church's prophetic witness to an outrage culture is to be a people who know how to weep together at the pain and injustice in the world (both past and present) and at the reality of our own sin and brokenness. We must learn to listen tot he fear and sadness underneath the anger that people spew through political vitriol and digital venom" (44).
"It is better to come to God with sharp words than to remain distant from him, never voicing our doubts and disappointments. Better to rage at the Creator than to smolder in polite devotion. God did not smite the psalmist. Through the Psalms, he dares us to speak to him bluntly.
"Yet, to make things trickier, most of us not only live in a culture that has inoculated itself against lament, we also live in a cultures where it's easy to assume we know better than God. We are taught in subtle ways that our feelings and experiences are the center of reality. This is cultivated in both big and small ways every day. An advertisement for jeans blares from my radio, proclaiming, 'I speak truth in my Calvins.' This constant messaging reduces us to mere agents of self-expression and curated identities--what we think, what we feel, what we want, and what we buy...We wait for God to convince us he's a useful accessory to our own project of self-creation. In this way, so very subtly, we approach God not in honest lament but as unhappy customers. God isn't giving us what we want, he isn't taking away the pain of this world, and frankly he's so terribly slow. We are not pleased with the job God is doing, and the customer is always right" (49).
"God himself took the time to grieve. He is no stranger to the weight of heartbreak and horror, to the ache of swollen eyes that have cried so long they've run out of tears. He did not numb himself or downplay the losses. He never gave a pat answer. God was--and remains-- shockingly emotionally alive" (51).
Prayer from friend & parishioner Noel: "Grant me, O Lord, for your sake, through the work of your Holy Spirit, love for my patient, joy in participating in this work, peace as I follow your lead, patience in the trying times of this case, kindness... to all in the room, goodness in this difficult task, faithfulness to have integrity in the details even when no one else but you sees... and self-control that my own sins of anger, anxiety, and vain-glory would not mar my judgment" (74).
"In the face of loss or failure, we launch immediately into work--into solutions, activity, programs, and plans--without leaving space for grief or attentiveness to God, our work will be compulsive, frenzied, and vain. (This is why, by the way, I reversed the prayer's order and began with weeping. Except in emergencies, there is usually wisdom in not going straight to work.) If we watch for God's restoration without also mourning and laboring, we minimize the urgent needs of the world and become sentimental, apathetic, or passive. If we weep without watching for the coming kingdom and participating in God's work, we fall into despair. To take up the practices of weeping and watching compels us to work, and our work is shaped and sanctified by being people who, through embodied and habitual practices, have learned to weep and to watch" (75).
"It turns out that God hasn't been trusted to keep bad things from happening to us for generations upon generations. And yet generations upon generations have trusted God.
"How can this be?
"We don't pray the way people use magic" (114).
"There is no contradiction here. Christian asceticism is never meant to be a denial of the goodness of materiality or embodiment. Christianity is an earthy, pleasure-affirming faith. But Christians have practiced self-denial in order to learn to enjoy good things in their proper place.
"We embrace ascetic practices to learn to suffer. We know that we all inevitably will suffer, so we practice it ahead of time. It's an exercise in discomfort... By doing so, we learn over time how to enter into a soothing that is deeper than what's offered by our drug of choice. We learn to face the pain we are avoiding" (133).
"Since birth we have been nurtured on the logic of consumerism--that pain can be erased, or at least dulled through enough consumption. If we can buy enough, be successful enough, be famous enough, imbibe enough, get the girl or the guy, get the home and the career, then our suffering can be soothed. We can even use spirituality in the same way, marketing God or the spiritual life as the path to self-fulfillment and triumph, not the way of the cross. We've been brought up on this lie like a daily vitamin, and it has harmed us--as people, as a culture, as a church" (134).
"There is wisdom that can be wrought only in self-denial--only when all our other props, devices, and numbing agents are taken away" (134).
"I can set up my own subconscious timetables, for myself or others, about how long suffering should last. But most often, healing takes longer than we think it should. The quick fix is always a temptation, but the quick fix for suffering is dishonesty, addiction, and the denial of their humanity. Even in the church we often want people to help themselves, fix themselves, and save themselves--and hurry it up already.
"But as we learn to long for God to soothe us and others, we also learn to wait on the slow process of him doing so" (136).
"In this prayer we ask God to 'pity the afflicted.' the word pity has fall on hard times. It seems woefully inadequate for what we long for. It sometimes invokes defensiveness, as in, 'I don't need your pity.' But the root of the word pity is from the Old French word for compassion. To feel pity is to share in someone else's sadness, to commiserate with another's suffering. In a world prone to tribalism and outrage, to hardheartedness, judgment, and apathy, we all need as much pity as we can get, both from God and others.
"And here again, this prayer challenges my assumptions. We don't ask God directly to take away the affliction of the afflicted--though he might, out of pity. That's what I most want to ask: 'Dear God, end all affliction.'
"And our hope is that God will. Someday.
"But for now, we ask that God would show sympathy. In this particular prayer, we don't ask for a permanent solution, but for God to suffer with us, which is what compassion literally means. We ask that God might feel what we feel, to enter into the dark room in which we find ourselves and sit with us in our pain and vulnerability. It's a bold ask: that God himself would suffer with the alcoholic, the homeless kid, the Alzheimer's patient, the bipolar woman in a manic spell--that somehow the Holy One would feel precisely and palpably what they are feeling. We're asking that God see this kind pain and enter into its depths, not as a voyeur but as one who suffers with us" (140).
