These Damn Holes
I have too many questions and not enough answers. But you don’t seem to be about answers. Which is frustrating. I want to understand. I want to know. I want to be right in my thinking. But you don’t care about that. You’re not some sensei dedicated to making me a master. In fact, you keep telling me that there is no mastering this way of being a little Christ.
Which makes no sense. I mean, can’t I measure my progress — my mastering — by how closely I am to your shape, your likeness? Can’t I hold myself up to you and see my progress in becoming a little more like you?
Yet, it’s like nailing Jell-O to the wall. You remain an enigma, an ever-changing thing that cannot be understood fully or defined in any definite way. You are something totally other.
Yet.
Yet you are human, one of us, fully stardust and guts, fully dirt and breath, fully mundane and magic. And still Light of Light, true God of true God.
Just another question I don’t have an answer to.
We try to formulate answers to the questions. We call it theology. God, you know I’ve done my share of theological thinking, of theological study, of theological teaching. It’s not that all that theology is wrong per se. It’s just incomplete. It lacks. A lot of it doesn’t make sense when the rubber meets the road and the shit hits the fan.
In the face of hardship and suffering, all this theology tends to fall apart. When I grieve and people quote your scripture at me, the scripture rings hollow, devoid of life and truth. When I’m hurting and people try and explain it away with, “God works all things for the good of those who love him,” it enrages me because my experiences are erased. When someone around us suffers, we all become Job’s friends, waiting to accuse, to blame, to give our theological answers to pain, suffering, grief, anger, and hardship. But those answers are wrong. They’re incomplete. They’re inadequate in the reality of suffering.
But we want the answers. We want the comfort of understanding.
Jesus, when you were here did you want answers, or were you blessed with infinite understanding and knowledge? Did you already have the answers, which is why the questions never bothered you? It’s just another way you and I are miles apart.
And this is where I stumble, this is where I fall. If you had all the answers, why didn’t you give them to us? If you knew the secrets that we struggle with, that we get hung up on, why didn’t you leave the answers with us? Why did you set us up to fail? By leaving us with nothing more than a had full of parables and some sermons to dissect, we are left wrestling and wondering, trying to “work out our salvation”, but with fear and trembling we stumble, stutter, and fall short, far short of your glory.
Life hurts. Do you know this? Do you remember this? Has the bliss of heaven eradicated the memory of the pain of earth? Do you remember why your scars are there, where they came from? Is your sacrifice for the sins of the world just a distant memory? If not, why do you let us hurt the ways we do? If you know what pain is, what suffering is, what it is to bleed, to be crushed to the bone, they why would you leave us not only to experience these things but to have no answers to the “why?”
Maybe I’m overthinking all this. Maybe I’m reaching beyond my status. Maybe I’m just angry. I don’t know. But I do know that you sitting in heaven, in some glorified radiance, does me shit all good down here. Days grind into each other, there is sundown and sunrise, and another twenty-four hours go on. And on. And on. Your reign in your kingdom doesn’t really mean much to me when I’m fighting with those I love, inflicting wounds just as much as I am wounded. Your sovereign rule goes right out the window when people die. How is it that I have victory in you with racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and every other systemic oppression stalking each of us in every realm of our lives? We are part of the oppression, or we are the oppressed — often we are both at the same time.
What the hell Jesus? Where are you? I don’t see you, don’t feel you, barely even remember you when I’m lost in the terror of a meaningless existence. When natural disasters strike — tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, and plague — and people, men, women, enbies, and children die in mass, where are you?
Again, theology comes to try and rescue us, but all that we are left with when trying to explain evil, pain, hardship, and suffering is some eloquent speech that boils down to shit happens. So, our answers are empty platitudes, and we are left orphaned by some god, only to suffer sickness, heartache, and death.
How can I believe in you?
How can I trust you?
How can I pledge my allegiance to you?
How can you let me down time and again?
You saved me from my sins only to leave me wandering and wondering in a wilderness where I suffer, where we all suffer. I’m not the only one with this grievance against you. There’s a reason my wife thinks your an asshole. I mean, can you blame her? Can you prove her wrong? Am I just yelling at an empty sky?
Look, I’m pissed off and hurt and crying out to you, and you stay silent. This is the reality of what it means for me to follow you. It’s always been this way, just most of my life I’ve been too scared to say it. I don’t know if all this is heresy or simply the ramblings of someone who lacks the faith to shut up and not say these things.
Truth is, I believe, everyone thinks these thoughts. In the face of our own hardship, no matter what it be, we are left with an empty picture of you, oh mighty and majestic God. And I’m angry about it. Either we shut ourselves off from this image of you, filling our spiritual lives with platitudes, scripture verses, and all the other shit that passes for comfort, or we are left destitute, trying desperately to believe in you — to believe you — but finding that there is nothing to hold onto.
And honestly, God, that’s not fair.
It’s not fair to us, to our kids, to our loved ones, or to our friends. Because when we are left to decide between holding into some shallow form of you or losing ourselves to despair, we can only choose that which makes those around us comfortable. So, we decide to believe in a shallow form of your divinity in hopes that the questions, the longings, the hurt, the pain will go away. We perform for the sake of our loved ones, pushing to the back these unanswerable questions.
But the questions don’t stop, won’t stop.
***
It’s times like these that I wonder why I’m not an atheist. Why should I believe in a God who may or may not be some magic watchmaker who set our system in place, wound it up, and simply lets it wear itself out? Why should I believe in a God who is seemingly powerless — or unwilling — to address suffering, pain, and hurt? It would be easier to simply dismiss you as a fantasy, something made up to provide comfort to some people.
But there is too much that has conspired between us for me to deny you, to write you off, to un-imagine you. There’s too much that I’ve seen, that I’ve felt, that I have believed. I can’t simply walk away. And this is one of the ways you grasp me, not letting go. I’ve tried to leave. I’ve tried to un-imagine you. I’ve tried to give into my unbelieving tendencies and become comfortable with you as a historical part of my life that I no longer believe. But then you pull me back into the baptismal waters, back into resurrection.
You won’t leave me alone.
I don’t understand it. I can’t reconcile you and suffering, you and pain, you and trauma, yet you keep pulling me back when I try to leave. Do you like having an angry disciple, a hurt child, a seeking-to-understand-but-can’t-accept-the-answers friend? Are you simply stubborn? Selfish? Determined to keep me confused and distraught, so you can say you have one more name in your book of life, one more notch on your belt? Why not just let me go?
Why do you hold onto me?
***
My faith fumbles and falls on you, Jesus. The questions that won’t stop bind my feet, entangle my heart, burden my mind, and I trip up, stumble, crashing hard down the mountain to be lost in the valley. You may be the capstone, the keystone, the cornerstone, but you are my stumbling block.
Did You ever stumble on God?
When Joseph died, did you find God’s absence to be too much? Did it hurt to feel the loss of a father? Did the pain stay with you, lingering through your life, a dull ache and waves of grief? As your mother wept, did you wonder why the Lord who announced your birth with angels and song remained silent and let grief consume her?
What about when Lazarus was laid to rest in that tomb? You wept with those who were weeping. I believe it was because you felt the grief of death, the loss of your dear friend, the void where someone once was and now wasn’t. But what about God? Where was God in the death of Lazarus? Was it all just some holy object lesson that you knew would work out with resurrection in the end? If that’s all it was, then it was unfair of you to weep.
And then there is Gethsemane, the place you sweated blood. Wasn’t God silent to your prayers? Did you ever receive an answer to your pleading for another way? Your resignation to the cross, was that done willingly, or was it simply the stonewall response to the silence of God?
In the times of the frailty of humanity, did you ever lose faith? I sure as hell do, and even though you don’t let me go, in your hand I still fall long and hard. You may hold me, but free fall is still occurring.
This is the paradox I don’t understand: how can you say you hold me, you keep me, you're faithful to me, while I’m riddled with faithless holes and questions and stumbling around in an existential dark, cursing like you’re some fever dream I rely on like a crutch? You don’t feel like me, Jesus. You feel so different, and I can’t imagine you having this paradox with the Divine. But here I am, questioning and stumbling over you, falling hard, and not knowing if I will ever recover.
My faith isn’t simple. It’s complex, twisted, murky. I don’t have some sort of quick reassurance that everything is as I want to believe it to be. You made me to wonder and question, and now your creation has turned that curiosity onto its creator. Will you stand against the scrutiny? Or will I be left with a handful of morning mist as I move into my mid-life, finally seeing that there is no God, and I truly am alone?