Should
I be furious at Jesus? Sometimes I think I am, deep down, but I’m not letting
myself express it, because it feels too dangerous.
Then
I feel that I am a miserable, sinful creature who is not praying enough,
doesn’t have enough faith.
Perhaps
God is like the city of Jericho and I should lay siege to Him, circle Him with
the blaring blasts of my prayers, willing Him to fall down to my will, to my
desire, to my unrelenting, focused faith that I will have what I want to have.
Then
I think that this is not so much faith as it is anger, that I am angry at Him
for never being done with me.
He
said that to me once. He said, you and I
will never be finished.
And
at the time, I thought that was a delicious thing for Him to say. He said it
with such love. I understood Him to mean that we would always be bound
together, in love, growing into and enjoying one another, because He is
infinite and I will always live in Him.
But
right now, I feel as if this is a burden, like a yoke that constrains me every time
I try to take a step.
And
He won’t give me the answer; He doesn’t tell me what to do. Or, more exactly,
He gives me the same answer as always, which is to remain, to wait. To abide, as it were. Which is a very Him sort of
thing to say.
Then I think that I am hardly suffering at all, compared to others, and even then, with my small amount of suffering, I am hardly able to bear up under it with any kind of grace, and that I should stop moaning and groaning and be grateful for everything that I do have, because I have so much already and everything will probably work out fine and then won't I feel silly?
And
then I step back from these sharp edges of myself and I feel pity and
compassion for myself, torn between these human responses to pain, and I think
that He is greater than these smaller answers.
I must do what He says, and rest in the mystery of Him, with all these ragged edges, the anger and the doubt and the guilt and the hope all mixed up and given over, soothed, as it were, in the great depth of His love, but still without answers.
I must do what He says, and rest in the mystery of Him, with all these ragged edges, the anger and the doubt and the guilt and the hope all mixed up and given over, soothed, as it were, in the great depth of His love, but still without answers.
And
it is difficult to be angry at someone who is holding you in their arms. If He
gave me some space, maybe I would. But I feel Him there all the time, not just
beside me, but holding me.
Sometimes
I feel as if I am stuffing my mouth with His robe to keep from crying out. It’s
just an image that comes sometimes, when the pain of not knowing, of waiting
here, is sharp and unbearable.
I
feel His constant presence, not only outside myself, as Himself, but within me,
welling up from and almost a part of my own spirit, as if we are bound
together, fused at deep level, so that we feel together what happens.
Richard
Rohr posted this a few days ago:
“Jesus hung in total solidarity with the pain of the world
and the far too many lives on this planet that have been “nasty, lonely,
brutish, and short.” After the cross, we know that God is not watching human
pain, nor apparently always stopping human pain, as much as God is found
hanging with us alongside all human pain. Jesus’ ministry of healing and death,
of solidarity with the crucified of history, forever tells us that God is found
wherever the pain is. This leaves God on both sides of every war, in sympathy
with both the pain of the perpetrator and the pain of the victim, with the
excluded, the tortured, the abandoned, and the oppressed since the beginning of
time. I wonder if we even like that. There are no games of moral superiority
left for us now. Yet this is exactly the kind of Lover and the universal Love
that humanity needs.”
-Adapted from “The Great Themes of Scripture: New Testiment”
