Lyrics

"You'll find the answer if you let it go. Just give yourself some time to falter, and don't forgo knowing that you're loved no matter what. And everything will come around in time."

That is from the song "Perfect Girl" by Sarah McLachlan. Listening to this cd, which I forgot I had, over the past two days has been healing for my soul, which is wrenched apart by a life that seems overly focused on suffering, pain, loss, and human evil. I've always had a blessing and a curse in my difficulty leaving things in the classroom. I wrap my heart and mind around new issues and uncertain issues continually. Searching for answers, if answers be had. As I compile final edits on my book that I look to publish come fall or sooner I feel so distant from the place I was when I wrote that. The part of the quote with which I now wrestle is the end. Will things come around in time? Will they "be okay?" I want to look at all the good this world has to offer, but frankly I am a little overwhelmed by the fact that after all this time humans still torture each other, go to war, enslave, rape, oppress, and so blatantly exploit other human beings.

That old concept of original sin looks so much more appealing to me than it has in a long time. I have faith in the individual good of humans, but am losing faith in the good or progress of humanity. I want to say we have progressed - and in areas, we have, but in other areas it seems as though we are simply spinning our wheels. I am so sick of spinning our wheels. As I look at what is really going on in the world I think of Fahrenheit 451 - I think of Wall-E, and how close we seem sometimes to those people who are so engrossed in what they are doing that they don't even know there's another world out there.

And most troubling is that I don't even know how to approach the situation on my own. I want to say there's a type of top down spiritual causation of which I long to be a part, but, to be honest, my faith is shaken. I've moved away from a sorrowful and heartbroken God of pathos because for a long time it was really unhealthy for me to experience the guilt brought about by thinking God wept for my sin and failure. Now as I weep because of the fact that worldwide women are still marginalized, dehumanized, objectified, raped, abused, and generally scapegoated, I wonder if God does not also weep in some way. Weep for the loss of "His" children. The story of the fall perplexes me deeply. What would it mean to return to the tree of life. Where is it? Because either there is some sort of DEEP rift between humans and divine presence, or there is no God, or there is not "sentient" God - some kind of divine God-force that we can open ourselves to and be transformed, but nothing acting consciously on the behalf of humanity and the rest of nature/creation. Even the Process understanding that God is NOT all powerful, but acts through a kind of creative lure, a persuasive and relational power rather than coercive unilateral power, is beginning to seem a bit hollow. It's sad to think that there are saleswomen out there who are more persuasive than God.

Moltmann talks about how in Christ God experiences God-forsakenness. "My God My God Why have you forsaken me?" is the cry. On the cross Christ experiences the utter terror and aloneness of being forsaken by God. Through his resurrection and ascension that is not the end, but the experience of God forsakenness is there, and has been taken up into God and integrated into God's being. Now God is present in the midst of God-forsakenness. When we are forsaken by God, God is present. In the negation of God, God comes to us in the crucified one, crying out from his own God-forsakenness. In our forsakenness we are not forsaken.

If God became enfleshed in Jesus in a unique and nearly impossible to understand way, then the terror of that moment must have been so absolute as to be unimaginable. I've heard that when people are in the midst of suffering they do not ask why God allows it to happen, but rather "where is God?" And as women and children are raped and abused around the world, and as we try to fix the economic system that we invented by pumping more and more money into it, hoping that productivity will once again save the day, all the while people are starving, species are going extinct, and hatred, greed, and resignation abound. And I have to ask myself what is my place in all of this? And as I leave Claremont with sixty thousand dollars in student loans to repay from all of my schooling up until now, I have no sense of freedom. I do not feel free. The opposite. I feel imprisoned by the economic order, I feel imprisoned by my own lack of experience. My desire to experience transformational travel abroad is refuted by the fact that we struggle right now to ensure we have enough money to pay all of our bills, while maintaining enough for the things that keep us sane.

And the fact of the matter is, action is just not enough. Letter writing isn't enough. Protesting isn't enough. But who says I have to do "enough"? What is it about humans - about me - that produces a sense of obligation to those we cannot even see? Where is God in all of this, and how will it change my own understanding of the world if I begin to consider a much more drastic cosmological rift between Divinity and "creation." Those people in Darfur who are ravaged and dying - humans doing this to other humans that they do not see as human. We say we have learned from the holocaust, but who is "we"?

Now we are caught up in this ridiculous capitalist system we have created for ourselves in which everyone must continue to produce and spend or it all falls to pieces. It hurts. And if your first response is to give me answers, or theology, then you haven't heard me. If that is your need, to explain it to me and make it make sense, don't. It doesn't make sense and it does hurt. This world makes no sense. A God who created it makes no sense. I hope the mystics are right. I hope this really is a very bad dream from which we will all one day awaken, sweat dripping down our spiritual faces and bodies, and breathe a grateful cry of relief that it was not as we had imagined it after all. That there is something else. That there is another realm, another place, another reality that we are not seeing here that makes it all make sense, that makes it worth the pain and the suffering. If there is a God I hope we can come home to that God soon, whatever that looks like, however it manifests.