The Bitter Christ: Suffering and Spirituality in Denial

Perhaps it was the less familiar translation; perhaps it was the circumstances of that particular day or simply the accumulation of many suppressed responses to relentless media images of conflict. Psalm 46, appointed for morning prayer in my small Benedictine book of offices,¹ suddenly unsettled me.

Come! See the wondersGod does across the earth:everywhere stopping wars,smashing, crushing, burningall the weapons of war. . . .And end of your fighting!Acknowledge me as God,high over nations, high over earth.

The utter unbelievability of those words in the context of that particular Sunday's devotional prayer struck home. These images were familiar, yet it was as though I had never experienced how radical and impossible their claim. Yes, "acknowledge God"; of course, "end your fighting"; but what wonders? What "stopping wars"? What doing away with "all the weapons of war?"

Praying the psalms over time is an essential spiritual practice. Normally this psalm has been for me an acclamation of the divine sovereignty, an affirmation of God's power in the course of human history. All that disappeared under the thought that it was hopelessly naïve to think that God makes wars to cease. In this I am not alone. To how many others in how many other circumstances has such a claim scraped across the chalkboard of a reasonably settled spiritual practice? Are shocks like this simply part of what one should expect within Christian spiritual practice and experience? Is such an acclamation sheer vain hope? Is this simply an irruption into prayer of the old religious question: why doesn't God do something? Was this a personal "grief burst" linking personal struggles and global suffering?

Reflecting with some distance on that moment, the shock does seem something to be expected if we take biblical spirituality seriously. Human history and the tangle of social forces simply prevent claims about God's sovereign power from becoming spiritual clichés or prayerful presumptions. The accounts of war dead—combatants and accidental ("collateral") victims—exceeds our mental and moral range. If we are to speak honestly about "spirituality" at all we have to confront the illusions so easily harbored in acts of spiritual practice. Spiritual self-deception and illusions of security abound when the world's suffering is ingested to the point of overload, prompting denial.

A passage in Miguel Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life haunts my sometimes easy assumptions about prayer and spiritual practice:

Those who say that they believe in God and yet neither love nor fear Him, do not in fact believe in Him but in those who have taught them that God exists. . . . Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-Idea, not in God Himself.²

If what we call spirituality is to come to maturity it will inevitably have to deal with the "passionate heart," with "anguish of mind," with doubt and that "element of despair" even in consolation. The mixed texture of our world—its terror and beauty—confronts our prayer and worship, our meditation and our liturgies. For increasing numbers of people the experience of the absence of God, or at least the loss of secure ideas of God, leads to giving up prayer and worship. For many, indifference is the consequence. For many others a cry of the heart pleads for something to replace the no longer available historical wonder-working God. This breeds a form of spiritual experience in which the perceived world seems all chance and fate. "Where were you, God, when the terror struck?" "Where are you now?" Persons in Christian and Jewish traditions recognize in these questions the language of lament figured in the Hebrew Psalms.

The incessant images and narratives of unlimited suffering we take in from the world of "news" are corrosive of the human spirit. A media-generated resignation to "the way things are" is one response; avoidance and denial another. Conventional ideas of God seem totally inadequate...