[Rest and re/New] on anger at God

Last night's Rest and re/New theme was being angry with God.

James mentioned Jacob wrestling with the angel and Laura T. commented that she really likes that Jacob doesn't leave the encounter unscarred.
She also said that often we're wrestling with the wrestling, and that that just makes things worse for ourselves.

Have I mentioned that everything makes me think of DBT these days? I talked some about "radical acceptance" -- which I said is not my strong suit :) -- and "doing what's effective." I said that lots of us come from backgrounds that encouraged us to deny/repress our anger at God and that's definitely not healthy, and so we need to find a middle ground -- to experience our anger, but not dwell in it, and to do what we need to with it, that sometimes you need to go and yell at God and sometimes you need to go for a walk and try to let go of the anger.

Lisa talked about William Schultz's article "What Torture Has Taught Me." Apparently he has done a lot of work with Amnesty International with torture survivors and is also a minister and he found himself wondering... if those survivors showed up at his church, what would they think of the theology he espoused? would they find it naive? would they find it deep and meaningful?
I thought of Mariella at Art Night last week talking about someone saying that your theology shouldn't be anything you "can't say in front of burning children."

I Googled just now for [theology "burning children"] and yay, GoogleBooks:

Irving Greenberg's principle that no statement, theological or other, can be made "that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children."⁹ (p. 128, Long night's journey into day: a revised retrospective on the Holocaust by Alice Eckardt & Arthur Roy Eckardt)
9. Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke," p. 23
[which I think (doing more GoogleBooks search) is: Irving Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity and Modernity after the Holocaust," in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? ed. Eva Fleischner (New York: KTAV, 1997), pp. 1-55]

In skimming through the footnotes, Moltmann's Crucified God, and possibly I have a new reading project...

P.S. Regular Google got me a top hit of a blogpost that opens with the quotation:

“No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.” Irving Greenberg

From the blogpost:

“Weep with those who weep,” St. Paul said, and indeed, sometimes as a chaplain that is almost all you can do. [...]

A theology that has everything figured out is not particularly helpful at such a time. My friend Jenny calls that “2 a.m. Theology” – and in fact, it was two in the morning – two a.m. theology cries in pain. It doesn’t have answers. Two a.m. theology just says, I don’t get it, but I’m here, and I believe you’re here, too, God. Even though I’m mad at you. Two a.m. theology believes God is crying, too.

[Beloved] "and the mercy of the fallen"

At my Thursday young adult church small group, we've been reading portions of Henri Nouwen's Life of the Beloved. He talks about how we are the Body of Christ, and he uses the Communion liturgy -- taken/chosen, blessed, broken, given -- as a framing device.

Excerpts from Blessed:

For me, personally, prayer becomes more and more a way to listen to the blessing.  I have read and written much about prayer, but when I go to a quiet place to pray, I realize that, although I have a tendency to say many things to God, the real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.  This might sound self-indulgent, but, in practice, it is a hard discipline.  [...]  To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear a voice of blessing --- that demands real effort.  [...]  It is not easy to enter the silence and reach beyond the many boisterous and demanding voices of our world and to discover there the small intimate voice saying: "You are my Beloved Child, on you my favor rests."  [...]  Often you will feel that nothing happens in your prayer.  You say: "I am just sitting there and getting distracted."  But if you develop the discipline of spending one half-hour a day listening to the voice of love, you will gradually discover that something is happening of which you were not even conscious.  It might be only in retrospect that you discover the voice that blesses you.

I was really struck by the idea of silent prayer as listening to the voice of love.  I'm familiar with the idea of listening to/for God during silent prayer, but I usually think of that as listening for God to tell you something, but of course just being in the Presence is valuable, and sometimes what God most wants to tell us is that we are Beloved.  (One could argue that what God always most wants to tell us is that we are Beloved.)

    My second suggestion for claiming your blessedness is the cultivation of presence.  By presence I mean attentiveness to the blessings that come to you day after day, year after year.  The problem of modern living is that we are too busy --- looking for affirmation in the wrong places? --- to notice that we are blessed.  Often, people say good things about us, but we brush them aside with remarks such as, "Oh, don't mention it, forget about it, it's nothing . . ." and so on.  These remarks may seem to be expressions of humility, but they are, in fact, signs that we are not truly present to receive the blessings that are given.  It is not easy for us busy people, to truly receive a blessing.  Perhaps the fact that few people offer a real blessing is the sad result of the absence of people who are willing and able to receive such a blessing.  It has become extremely difficult for us to stop, listen, pay attention, and receive gracefully what is offered to us.

I'd been thinking recently about how when people are really grateful to me and I respond by saying that what I did wasn't a big deal, that I diminish their experience, that I implicitly say that the thing I helped them with wasn't a big deal (even though that's not what I mean) and also that in refusing to accept their gratitude I was denying them the ability to give me a gift.

    Before concluding these thoughts about our being blessed, I must tell you that claiming your own blessedness always leads to a deep desire to bless others.  The characteristic of the blessed ones is that, wherever they go, they always speak words of blessing.  It is remarkable how easy it is to bless others, to speak good things to and about them, to call forth their beauty and truth, when you yourself are in touch with your own blessedness.  The blessed one always blesses.  And people want to be blessed!  This is so apparent wherever you go.  No one is brought to life through curse, gossip, accusations, or blaming.  There is so much of that taking place around us all the time.  And it calls forth only darkness, destruction, and death.  As the "blessed" ones, we can walk through this world and offer blessings.  It doesn't require much effort.  It flows naturally from our hearts.  When we hear within ourselves the voice calling us by name and blessing us, the darkness no longer distracts us.  The voice that calls us the Beloved will give us the words to bless others and reveal to them that they are no less blessed than we.

Excerpt from Broken:

Living our brokenness under the curse means that we experience our pain as a confirmation of our negative feelings about ourselves. It is like saying, "I always suspected that I was useless or worthless, and now I am sure of it because of what is happening to me." There is always something in us searching for an explanation for what takes place in our lives and, if we have already yielded to the temptation to self-reflection, then every form of misfortune only deepens it. [...] It is so arduous to live without an answer to this "Why?" that we are easily seduced into connecting the events over which we have no control with our conscious or unconscious evaluation. When we have cursed ourselves or have allowed others to curse us, it is very tempting to explain all the brokenness we experience as an expression or confirmation of this curse. Before we fully realize it, we have already said to ourselves: "You see, I always thought I was no good.... Now I know for sure. The facts of life prove it."

***

It's been a particularly dominant theme recently that people I love reach out to me first when they're in crisis. No matter what I do or fail to do in my "real job" (either now or any job I have in the future), this is reason enough for my being on this earth.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came,
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor I learned to create
from another's suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.
-from "What I Learned from My Mother" by Julia Kasdorf

***

This morning I happened upon a Magpie Girl blog post, Quiten Down: How to Shut Up your Gremlins. Excerpt:

“Gremlin” is the term coined in Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson. It’s a way of describing the little voices in your head that tell you untrue things. This American Life did a great piece on Gremlins called The Devil In Me. In the second act Nancy Updike asks people what the little voice inside their heads is telling them. The answers are at turns tragic, stunning, and most of all, utterly familiar. Go ahead and have a listen. We’ll wait…

Are you back? Did you hear your own Gremlins in there? I know I did.

When my life coach, Jena Strong, first suggested that I started working with my Gremlins, I wanted to throw the book at her head. I couldn’t pin my Gremlins down long enough to find out if they had girl parts or boy parts; I couldn’t read their name tags; and doggonit, they were LEGION! My Gremlins? They were very, VERY noisy.

Then Jen suggested that I take all the voices in my head and make hash marks. In any given day how many times did my Gremlins say something nice to me, and how many times did they say something negative? I tried this. After 48 hours I did not have one single hash mark in the positive column. The negative column on the other hand was quite lively.

Jen said that since my Gremlins were so very busy, maybe I should build them somewhere to go after work. After all, they did have my best intentions at heart. They were trying to protect me – to keep me from doing anything scary, or potentially painful, or too awfully adventuresome. So maybe I should give them a nice shag carpet and, in the words of Jena “sit them down and pour them a stiff drink already.”

So I did. I made them a crash pad in the charming urban-decay style. Wall paper, gilt mirrors, and battery operated twinkly lights…I spared no expense. As I worked on this mansion for the little demons, my un-namable Gremlins began to take dimension and shape. They became less ethereal, and more manageable. Soon the legion was happily ensconced in a pretty little Gremlin dollhouse.

Now that I was a full five feet taller than they were, I felt empowered. I could totally kick their butts. Like Jen says, if they misbehave I could just send them to paperdoll Gitmo.

I rapidly discovered I was not at all pleased that Gremlin Blythe had allowed the other Gremlins to propagate, so I made her put everybody on a neat little leash. The next step was to let the Gremlins take ownership of their own messages, so they didn’t rattle around in my busy little mind. I’ve always adored those little slips of paper that come in fortune cookies, so I cut a whole stack of them and put them next to a tin in the Gremlin dollhouse. Here are just some of the messages that filled that tin up in the first few hours:

“Where you are is not good enough.”
“You never get enough done.”
“Your passions aren’t strong enough.”
“You can’t climb out of this confusion.”
“You never finish anything.”
“WHIMP.”

Now, keep in mind that I have been writing, reading, and carrying around affirmations to counter these messages for weeks. But something about writing them down in their negative, shitty versions was totally empowering. Now they belonged not to me, but to this third person – the Gremlins. They weren’t mine to have and to hold, and they weren’t mine to carry. Now Blythe and her crew could tuck them away on their bookshelf and keep them dusted and alphabetized. Not. My. Problem.

I cannot tell you strongly enough how much of a breakthrough this has been for me. My noisy Gremlins are much quieter these days, and when they do start getting chatty I act like a staff writer from the Evening Post—I just make the report. The quote gets shorthaneded onto a slip of paper and tucked into their dollhouse. End of story.

***

Other posts from my browsing of the Magpie Girl blog:
* The Do Less Revolution - The Have-Done List.
* Sacred Commerce: on finding a new way to serve and sustain.
* Lessons from an Artist: On speaking with authority about what you do.

"Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you establish their rule of the earth?"

A UCC church I'm affiliated with is doing a Lenten series called "Making the Faith Our Own In This Generation." One week, the topic was "suffering, poverty, and (in)justice." We read some Scripture passages as well as some readings from the Social Gospel movement and Liberation Theology, and then we were invited to generate a short list of questions which we would then discuss in smaller groups.

I said, "I want to ask, 'Why does God allow suffering?' but that seems too big a question to inflict on a small group for a 45-minute discussion." The facilitator insisted that it was a good and important core question :)

A couple days later, I saw a friend mention a Radio National "Encounter" program called "Ashes," looking at the Book of Job. (Transcript and audio available here.)

There were a few things which really stuck out at me as I read the transcript.

1. As with so many stories in the Hebrew Scriptures, this story includes arguing with God.

Relatedly, I'm really intrigued, for example, by the midrashic [I think -- I forget where I encountered this] reading that in the aqedah (the binding of Isaac -- Genesis 22), Abraham was supposed to refuse to sacrifice his son -- he fought back against God's plan to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah just a few chapters earlier after all (Genesis 18:16-33) -- and that the blessing he got after the saving of Isaac wasn't as great as the blessing God had initially planned to bestow on him.

Jason Kalman: Elie Wiesel, for example, has written that even though God behaves in an unjust manner with regard to Job, Job is really at his greatest point heroic for standing up to God, for challenging God. And as such, human beings have a responsibility in the face of all injustice, whether divine or human, to stand up for the righteous.

One of the things we talked about in our small groups was the issue of justice -- our obligation to help bring about the kin(g)dom of God here on earth.

2. how do we suffer

David Rutledge: It brings up this question of why, which is not answered in the text, why do these terrible things happen to Job, why do the righteous suffer, why does God allow suffering? If that question is not answered, if we take away that question, what kinds of questions are we left with? Is Job in some sense a book about how to suffer?

Jason Kalman: Well, it may be. Certainly contemporary Jewish teachers have tried to read it that way. The question of the 'what' of suffering really becomes dominant. 'Since I've now suffered, what do I do as a result?' Certainly Job's attempts to seek out God, to try and find the just path, is a model that becomes important. Certainly Job's challenges to God's justice take on a particularly important role after the Holocaust. Not to explain the why of suffering, but how one should respond. That is, we should always demand justice. We should always learn from the event: if I can't learn about God, at the very least, I should be able to learn how to respond to that suffering, either by becoming more empathetic, or by actually physically going out and taking what I've learned from the disaster to help avoid future disasters.

The speakers on the program were careful to not justify suffering by the good that can come from it, but I also appreciated this articulation of what we can learn from suffering -- if I can't learn about God, at the very least, I should be able to learn how to respond to that suffering, either by becoming more empathetic, or by actually physically going out and taking what I've learned from the disaster to help avoid future disasters.

3. This next section brings to my mind the analogy about how you only get [naturally-occurring] diamonds after incredible amounts of pressure have been exerted on carbon.

Mark Vernon: One answer to the question of why we suffer is that it's a necessary part of our make-up, it's just what it is to be biological creatures, to be psychological creatures. There's no happiness without sadness; there are no good things in life without struggle. But that doesn't seem to be a hugely satisfactory answer to me, for two reasons. One is that it seems rather calculating, and if there's one thing not to be when it comes to trying to deal with suffering, that is calculating. Reason compounds suffering, if you like.

[...]

Mark Vernon: I don't think there's any rational sense to be made of it, but there is perhaps experiential sense to be made of it. One of the things which I noticed when I was a priest is that often the times when people are suffering very greatly, when they've got ill children or when someone who's loved has died, and they're often the most meaningful moments in people's lives. It's then that they know that they really loved the person who has gone, or that they really care for the child, and they're very intense experiences in some way that they never felt so alive as during that time. And so there's a mystery here, if you like, that while you would never will that suffering upon people, it can be a very profound experience.

I'm in some ways positively inclined toward an "ends justify means" line of explanation, but I also recognize that that's not always the best response.

4. the issue of choice

Havi Carel: I think this emphasis on choice is something that's very important to the discussion of illness and suffering, because even though the illness and the suffering might be unavoidable, and inflicted on you by an external process, you still have the choice as to how to respond to it. The discovery for me that I was the only person who could decide how to respond to it, how I would respond to it, was an immense sense of freedom, precisely because it restores some of the sense of autonomy that is really massively damaged, at least initially when you become ill.

I think this is arguably the hardest one -- to think about the choices we have in respond to difficult situations, especially when it feels like so many of our options have been stripped from us.

5. God shows up.

David Rutledge: Well, it's interesting you talk about maintaining a relationship with the God of the Book of Job, because in some respects, a relationship is precisely what that God disavows. God's engagement with Job, apart from allowing him to be afflicted with suffering, is limited to saying, 'I'm God and you're human, you don't understand me, so keep quiet and just take what's meted out to you'.

Jason Kalman: Well, I think there is that issue - but there's also the fact that Job demands a personal encounter with God and God actually responds. I might not like what God says, but the fact that God shows up, I think, offers a redemptive note.

I don't know how to articulate my thoughts on the "I'm God and you're not, so sit down and shut up" section. Every time I start to talk about where/how/when I think I tend to think about this section, it's like I realize that's not actually accurate. I will say that I've come to appreciate more the "It's a mystery" line, just kind of general.

6. We keep living.

David Rutledge: What about the end of the story? We've mentioned the way in which it's made the book problematic for readers who are addressing questions that come up through the Holocaust, the experience of suffering there. Job is apparently rewarded, which seems to contradict everything that's gone before. How do you read that ending?

Robert Eisen: Well, it is a very troubling ending, and let me share with you the comments of a couple of the more obscure commentators in the Jewish tradition, who basically think that it was tacked on as a way of kind of just appeasing the masses. You know, in other words, Job isn't rewarded in the end, but the author had to put something in there to make them feel good.

I'd like to go in a different direction by saying that it is part of the book, and the issue of whether God rewards him is one thing, and I'm not sure I have a good answer to that - but the thing that really strikes me about it is that he gets back into life. Who's Job at the end of this incredible of tragedies? Is he a broken person who simply gives up? No. He goes back, he raises a family, he gets married and raises a family, and that to me is the most important message that I think a Jew can respond to - and maybe any human being - which is that if you experience tragedy, don't give up.

The fact that Job engages in a dialogue, the fact that at certain points in the text he protests against God, I think that's very modern, that appeals to my sense of the need to talk about injustice, to engage God in dialogue in which you question him. I think we should all do that, all people of faith. And again, the fact that in the very end Job has enough faith to raise a second family. Many Jews lost families in the Holocaust, and it just is a marvel to me that they made a new life in Europe, America, and raised children again. So having that faith not necessarily in God, but in human living, and in moving on past suffering, I see that in Job and I find that very inspiring.

I'd never thought about that before -- that Job starts over after having lost everything, sets himself at risk for losing everything all over again. (Though I do remember it feeling bizarre to me that Job got a whole new family like magic, as if you could just replace people you loved like they were interchangeable.)

7. We are not in control.

Laurie Woods: It's one of those few books I think in the bible that says life isn't about control - and I think that's something that touches us in the 21st century, we're all control freaks, we all want to be in control.

And we can't control God, and Job realises he can't control anything that's going on in his life, so he sits back, not so much agnostically, because as I said before, he knew God through tradition but now through life, experience, suffering agony, he's come to know God in a different kind of way, and through struggle, he has been able to emerge transformed.