Sometimes, I wish that God wasn’t real.

If God wasn’t real it would mean that I could toss these fervent prayers into air, where they vanish and can’t hurt me (can’t change me, can’t transform me), that I can be as pious as I want in the comfort of words, sincerely meant but non-committal.

If God wasn’t real I could acknowledge, “Oh, yes, this keeps me from God,” and symbolically offer it up but in reality change nothing because there’s no real relationship to maintain.

If God wasn’t real all this “Christian life” could be merely a string of rotating New Year’s Resolutions, promises to get better-get right-change with no accountability and no real consequence.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10:31)

I prayed two stupid, stupid prayers recently, overzealous and dangerous.  One, in one of those moments of “identify what things separate you from God” and I wrote down “my independence”.  The other was whispered late one night after an exhausting, discouraging day: “Break me.”  A sign of submission, of breathing into the pain rather than trying to fight it (fighting it rarely ever goes well for me), making sense of what was happening, putting it into a narrative of “God is working through this, and if this is what needs to happen, may it be so.”

But these prayers, of course, were prayed to the carefully constructed version of God I have in my head, a god who is not living and vibrant and dangerous but understood and mild, who I can keep at a safe distance.  A god who hears these prayers and appreciates them and nods at me with a slight smile and pats me on my head and sends me along my merry way.  Not God.  Not the living God who takes me at my word and says, “Okay.  Let’s go.”  

And the last few weeks have been utterly disorienting.  Some things that have been wonderful, some things that have been awful, and all of it swinging back and forth so much it feels like I have whiplash.  No balance, no equilibrium, disruption of routine to the point where getting basic tasks accomplished is nearly impossible, and “bad luck” to farcical proportions, where despite all my best efforts, something goes wrong and I’m right back to where I started.  The full story of all that’s been piling up actually sounds too ridiculous to be true.  And most of the time when I stop all the action to just exist, to be, to think, to feel, I feel this deep sense of defeat.  It’s not depression, it feels distinctly different than that.  (it feels like I am trapped in a Beckett play?)  Depression, as I’ve experienced, tends to feel like a losing all desire, motivation, joy.  This feels… well, it feels like my bones are being broken, one by one.  I still want to move, but moving takes so much effort and causes so much pain, so I live in this, well, returning to Beckett, state: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (Psalm 51:17)

They say that “God will never give you more than you can handle,” but I think God comes damn close.  Remember, this is the God that told Abraham to kill his own son as a sacrifice.

“But wait!” you say, “God was only testing Abraham! God saved Isaac at the last minute!”

You know what?  I don’t care.  Try telling that to Abraham, who goes through the experience of leading his son, who he loves (the Bible specifies that), to death at God’s command.  Try telling him, on that journey to the place God showed him, that everything’s going to be okay.  I spend a lot of time reading commentaries and I am TIRED of the ones that try to justify everything, take the bite out of it, smooth it over.  Try telling the Canaanite woman, “it’s okay, Jesus didn’t REALLY mean to call you a dog, it was a term of endearment!”  Try telling Mary and Martha that it’s okay that their brother died, it’d all be fine in the end.  Try telling the Egyptian families who lost their firstborn children because the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he would not let the Israelites go that the deaths of their children were for God’s glory.  TRY.

I’m in a really phenomenal Hebrew exegesis class right now focusing on women in the Old Testament, where all questions can be put on the table no matter how heretical they sound, and it feels like one of the underlying questions in this class is always about the character of God.  We Christians often ignore the majority of the Old Testament and I don’t think it’s because of then often used excuse of “the Old Testament is boring, just names and laws,” which is so utterly UNTRUE, the Old Testament is filled with story and philosophy emotion and sex and violence.  I think we ignore it because we are scared of many of the images of God we find in the Old Testament.  An inquisitive God, a violent God, a God who strikes people down, a God whose mind is changed, did I mention violence because I’m not sure you know how violent I mean (think “killing someone by driving a tent peg through their skull so deep it pinned his head to the ground”), a God whose whims are absolutely unknowable, a God who uses people (and not in the good way), a God who turns away from those who God once favored.  A God who works under the operation that “these people are good” and “these people are bad” and the bad ones die and we accept that because “that’s God’s will”.  A God that certainly does not seem merciful.

So often instead of engaging with all of that, we play the Jesus card (the ultimate trump card), we quote John 3:16, we talk about Christ’s suffering and death as proof of God’s love for us, fallen sinners, but if I’m going to be brutally honest I thought about Christ’s death this week and there was a little voice inside of me that said, “What if Jesus’ death wasn’t about ‘paying the price for our sins’ or whatever atonement theory you put on it?  What if Jesus’ death was paying the price of how God had treated us?  What if Jesus was God’s apology to us?”

Which probably was grounds for a lighting bolt to strike me dead, but I’m somehow still standing.

O Lord, you have enticed me,

and I was enticed;

you have overpowered me,

and you have prevailed.

I have become a laughing-stock all day long;

everyone mocks me. 

For whenever I speak, I must cry out,

I must shout, ‘Violence and destruction!’

For the word of the Lord has become for me

a reproach and derision all day long. 

If I say, ‘I will not mention him,

or speak any more in his name’,

then within me there is something like a burning fire

shut up in my bones;

I am weary with holding it in,

and I cannot. (Jeremiah 20:7-9)

Some people translate that word up there, “enticed”, as “raped”.  It’s certainly a controversial translation, but it got a footnote on the Harper Collins Study Bible, which I believe also called this “the most blasphemous part of the Bible”, so of course, it’s one of the sections closest to my heart.

I’ve been in this kind of space for a bit now, theologically.  This scary living God and what that means for me and this dread that this is only the beginning and the near certainty that God will break every bone in my body before this is done.  The larger “this”, the lifetime “this”, not the temporary this that I do know will eventually pass.  I wonder if that’s bad theology, this almost interventionist idea of God, who I don’t believe truly meddles in human affairs… but, then I believe that the Holy Spirit works and leads us through the events that are happening to the path that God intends us to walk.

And through all of this, I wonder, because I hear these same kinds of questions from friends who have left religion, who grappled with these questions about God and decided to walk away from belief.  It’s a choice I understand, it’s a choice I respect—but it’s not the choice I make.  There was a time that I might have, there was a time I essentially did (though my period of agnosticism was more about logic than theology), but that time is long gone.  Not saying it couldn’t happen, but I’d be enormously surprised if it did.  And that has nothing to do with seminary, nothing to do with my “career” or whatever, this staying in, engaging with religion and God, became a permanent fixture of my life long before I ever seriously considered seminary.  And so in these moments, I wonder: why do I stay?

I don’t have a pretty answer for that.  I don’t have a politically correct answer for that.  There is a part of me that would say it’s about how empty it would be cutting out the religious, which is what I experienced when I did for those years (one sip from the hand of God and the world begins to taste like ashes… what would we not sacrifice to live among the lightning flashes? The Hidden Sky).  There is a part of me that feels like Jeremiah—if I try to stop, I can’t, it wells up within me and I can’t hold it in.  There is a part of me that appreciates it because I’ve never been fond of religion that smooths out all the wrinkles and pretends that life doesn’t happen.

But the quote that I really come back to… isn’t a quote from scripture, or a theologian, it’s actually… a tweet, from the twitter account of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale:

Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.

Ultimately none of this is about me.

Not to discount me, I know, I have a unique perspective and gifts that are important and God uses (in a good way) and God loves me and all of it.  But ultimately none of this is about my own prosperity.  That’s not what I signed up for.  It’s for the world.  The transformation of the world into a place where everyone is known and cared for and loved.  Which sounds absolutely impossible but I’ll argue that most people who are working for some kind of change in the world are working for a vision like that, whether God is part of their language or not.  I believe, ultimately, that is God’s purpose, God’s goal—the establishment of that kind of Kingdom on Earth, which I will never live to see but working towards it is worth it.  So if there’s a way that God is working through this awful time to do something to transform me to be suited for that work in a new way, that’s worth it.

To be clear: God will be dragging me kicking and screaming the whole way.  It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.  It doesn’t mean I won’t hate the whole process.  I’m hesitant to even use the word “but” because a “but” seems to try to make things okay and they are not.  It is painful and… I believe it is being used for good.