Anger?

Well, looks like we're in full "wrestle" mode now.

Am I angry at God? Many have told me that it's OK to express my anger at God. The Psalms, Jeremiah, perhaps even Job, furnish us with inspired examples. And I know that God knows the frame he gave us; that anger itself is an indifferent, even if risky, emotion.

I also know that Lewis allowed himself some anger. Those were the most moving parts of his book, bringing me to tears:

Meanwhile, where is God?... When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him,... if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house.

Closings, closings, closings.

I would say that my image is a little different from Lewis's. For me, there is a window in the door, and I can see God looking through it. But in this case, he just looks. I wish I could tell you that my mind's eye shows him looking with compassion, like "Jesus looked at him and loved him" (Mk. 10:21), or "Seeing the crowds, he was moved with compassion for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd" (Mt. 9:36). But that is not what I see. He just watches.

Belief in a provident God is a two-edged sword: it means that God cares for the sparrows. But it also means he watches as sparrows fall (Mt. 10:29).

In suffering, I have never really felt abandoned by God, like the great spiritual writers describe the experience of the Dark Nights. Sometimes I just feel watched by him, and no more.

And Lewis continues:

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’

Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’?

What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking; hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were ‘led up the garden path’. Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the
next torture.

These are difficult words. The last part is not irrelevant to our situation. We all had a similar experience, particularly on January 4th (my poor daughter's 14th birthday) moving into January 5th. January 5th is when I wrote to my colleagues and said that their prayers were working; that Heidi was doing better, and that a road to recovery was widening. It seems so... tragic now.

With the last shred of my intellect, fortified (I hope) with infused Faith, I still believe that everyone's prayers achieved something. Kate wrote a beautiful account of the good that came from the slowing of Heidi's demise. But I can only hold on to all that with my cold, judgment-making intellect. At the level of my tired emotions, it feels like the absurd only got absurder.

Lewis talked himself out of his darker thoughts later. In doing so, he makes clear that they were thoughts of anger.

I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought.... All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back. It was really just Billingsgate — mere abuse; ‘telling God what I thought of Him’. And of course, as in all abusive language, ‘what I thought’ didn’t mean what I thought true. Only what I thought would offend Him (and His worshippers) most. That sort of thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it ‘off your chest’. You feel better for a moment.

Am I angry at God? For the most part, I have not been. For the most part. (But Lewis began writing a month after his wife's death. I am only now entering that period...)

I do know what it is like to be angry at God. My second grief in life was much like what Lewis described. I was not worried about ceasing to believe in God. But unlike Lewis, I also knew better than to wonder if he was actually good. For I understood that, in the Christian tradition, God's all-goodness meant that all goodness comes from him; that anything that has being is, to that degree, good, and depends for its goodness on God. St. Augustine's Confessions, Book VII.

I have long noticed that modern thinking tends to understand certain terms in a purely moral sense that, in the past, had a much broader sense. And this would not be a problem, except for the fact that we have inherited a certain stock vocabulary about God's attributes from the past, and yet we try to understand them on our terms today. Terms like "perfect/imperfect" and "good/evil" have very different meanings now than they did when the divine attributes were formulated by the ancient theists and church fathers. I think Lewis demonstrates our modern default understanding of these terms in his own wrestling.

If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine.

I, on the other hand, knew that God's goodness means a glorious universe, a universe that includes matter, generation and corruption. I knew that God's goodness never meant that he was a cosmic divine boy scout that spends all his time making sure everyone is helped and no one is hurt. I knew that what humans must do to save each other when they can is not binding on God. For when a human fails to save a fellow human in spite of a facility for saving him or her, it denotes a bad will in loving your fellow man. But when God leaves it off — well, he's got a universe to run, after all! A universe composed of diversity and contraries, motion and change. He can't preserve every being every time! For he is the God of ALL being. I guess even the God of streptococcus.

In the midst of the anger of my second grief, I knew that God was good. I never doubted that. But, as I expressed it to someone at the time, I just didn't see how I was included in that good. The universe works; God is good; but not necessarily to me.

I know it sounds whiny. But I can't see how that is not also the basic lesson of the book of Job. Job contends with God, essentially pleading with a "why?". Then God basically says from out of the whirlwind, "Who are you? Did you not know that I've been engineering a cosmos since way before you existed, and it's way bigger than you?" And Job can only say, "OK. I'll shut my mouth."

For the most part, I know better than to be angry this time around.

First of all, in my last grief, the anger got me nowhere. How could it do otherwise? St. Thomas says that anger is a mixture of sorrow and hope: sorrow at a perceived injustice to ourselves, and hope for revenge. Lewis in his grief, and I in my second grief, learned the same lesson. "Getting back" at God is simply an irrational, thoughtless exercise. Sometimes emotions are powerful and we feel like we need to do it. But you can't win against the Almighty.

Without the hope, there is just the sorrow. And I'm too tired to be angry. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light"? I don't have the energy.

The other thing is this: in that second grief of mine, I saw no path to the "greater good" for me. I saw no way that everything would work out for my good. I saw what I thought was the exhaustive set of options, and all of them were painful. I gave up on being a part of God's will for the good.

But I was wrong. For it was the chain of events that were part of my second grief that led me to the greatest good of my life. For those events eventually led me to Heidi.

Not only was I included in God's plan for the good. It was a great, superabundant good. By sheer act of will in these days, I can tell God I am grateful for it; and in my more nostalgic, bittersweet moments, I can even feel thankful for it.

But now... what?

Can I think now that there is going to be a greater good out of all this? That just feels wrong. It feels impious, in the old Roman sense of that word: lacking in devotion to what is mine — in this case, my wife. How can I be allowed to have a greater good in life than my life with her?

I brought this up to a friend. She said that the good that God is working all things toward (Rom. 8:28) now is probably just Heaven.

Oh, how those words deflated me.

Recently, I entered middle age: the time when life begins to feel so short. Now, it seems so long again. Must I have already peaked in terms of earthly joy? Is it only vale of tears from here?

I have noticed in recent days that I lose all inhibitions for speech when I visit Heidi's grave. There, I say things that I never thought I would say. A few days ago, I found myself praying to her, asking her to intercede to God for me. And then I asked to her to ask God to hasten the Second Coming. So that I don't have to wait...

It's not rational. (Still, you should probably all be ready).

Heidi and I had a really good marriage. Heidi was taking such good care of our children. Heidi had some wonderful projects going. Our life was so happy. God, can't we have anything nice when you're around?

I am reminded of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins in which he, too, wrestles with God.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

No, for the most part, I am not angry. Just disappointed.


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