Wednesday March 23, 2005
The absence of God
Her son had died that afternoon.
He was personable young man. He had gone to the shed, to prepare some material for house renovations. After a while, his mother didn\’t hear him working. She went to check. She found him lying on the floor. He was not breathing.
I can\’t name her, because she hasn\’t given me permission to tell this story.
That evening, as friends who had lived through similar losses prepared to leave her house, she stepped alone into the back yard. I heard her scream at the stars, “Where are you, God? Where ARE you?”
Some might think of that cry as a loss of faith. I don\’t. It was, perhaps, the most powerful possible affirmation of faith. Because it\’s clear that in that terrible loss she recognized God\’s absence. And you can only do that if, previously, you have been aware of God\’s presence.
Nor is she the only person to utter such a despairing cry.
Primal scream
The morning after our son died, I went downstairs to the telephone, and found myself suddenly overcome. With my head against the wall, I wailed, “Oh, Stephen, Stephen, I miss you so!”
The emotion is too strong to keep inside. It has to come out. It has to be expressed. It has to be uttered out loud.
King David did it when his oldest son was killed in battle: “Oh, Absalom, my son my son! Would that I had died instead of you…”
Even Jesus did it. On the cross, on the day we call Good Friday, he uttered the heart-rending cry – “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”
Can anyone accuse Jesus of loss of faith?
One school of psychotherapy calls this the “primal scream.” It\’s a cry that goes beyond rational consciousness, a cry that carves to the roots of the soul.
It\’s like clearing the decks, like sweeping the fine china of conventional life onto the floor, like booting the last shreds of everything that you knew, everything that you ever valued, into a distant corner.
It\’s a moment of total catharsis.
Catharsis, not cure To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to [email protected]. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing.
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For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to [email protected].
It\’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
“Primal scream” therapists felt they had succeeded when their clients, stripped of all defences, uttered the scream of pain that no longer cared who heard it, that no longer cared what anyone thought of them. Having cleared the decks, the therapists assumed, a new and more ordered life could commence.
It doesn\’t work that way.
The same fallacy assumed, for centuries, that children needed to be humiliated by vicious discipline so that they could be rebuilt into little gentlemen. That horses must be “broken” before they can be successfully saddled. And that army recruits had to endure boot camp misery to become soldiers.
Perhaps it also accounts for the popularity in some circles of hellfire and brimstone preaching.
But catharsis is not cure. Nor is it explanation.
Would a loving God deliberately destroy a young man to test someone else\’s faith? Then, or now? I don\’t, I can\’t, I won\’t believe that.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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