First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
2 January 2005
No, Not Now...
You can probably tell from my squeaky voice that I've had a bad bug for the last few days. As a Southern California physician once announced to the press concerning a celebrity patient under his care, it seems that I have "not fulfilled my wellness potential."
Having been home sick nearly all week long, I've watched a lot of the news coverage of the South Asian tsunami. It has been, to say the least, wrenching. If you've been following the TV coverage too, by now you will surely have seen something that has torn your heart out—maybe piles of bodies unceremoniously bulldozed into mass graves; maybe a child with impossibly big eyes standing alone, staring into the distance; maybe the stunning before-and-after satellite photos of a ravaged coast.
Or perhaps you saw the piece in which a reporter is speaking with several Indonesian survivors, some of whom have lost their entire families. They tell their stories to him, some with unnerving stoicism, some wailing and striking their heads with flat hands. Then, in the background you begin to hear an unmistakable sound. It is Friday, and somewhere in that desolate place, a muzzein is calling the faithful to prayer—as if to remind the whole flooded world that no matter what, God lives, and that to pray is just what one does, what one must do, for everything to make sense.
Allah akbar! God is great! There is no God but God. Come to salvation! Come to prayer!
Hearing the call to prayer, the reporter asks the men he is interviewing if they are going to the prayers. Some nod yes. But one man, who has just told us that 24 of his family members are dead, shakes his head. Through the translator he says simply, "No, not now. Now I do not have it in me to pray."
When I heard that call to prayer float authoritatively over the devastation, I almost got sick. Like most of you, I do not believe that God caused this catastrophe or even permitted it with some purpose that only God knows but will never reveal, and that we are supposed to believe is somehow for our good. I don't begrudge survivors their relief, but I am bewildered by the conviction of some of them that God was watching over them, answering their pleas for safety. Do they mean to say that God was not watching those who died? I do not believe that God is as capricious as the waves that tore into poor villages and rich resorts alike, killing many and leaving some. God is good, God is faithful—that's what I believe.
Nevertheless, when I heard the call to prayer go out inviting everyone to come to the good God and find salvation, I felt something rebel in my stomach. In spite of my religious training and my deep conviction that God had nothing to do with making this horror happen, my mind filled involuntarily with the age-old Big Questions, and they would not be repressed. What is it that one could possibly pray for in the midst of such misery? And why would one ask anything of a God who seems to have stood by and done nothing while it unfolded?
Pastors are supposed to help strengthen people's faith and to be good examples in times of trouble, so I hope I will not disappoint or scandalize you when I confess that in that moment, it was not enough for me to answer my own questions by saying that God was not responsible when tectonic plates collided and the sea floor rose and the displaced water needed somewhere to go. It was not enough for me simply to affirm, in C. S. Lewis' words, that God is not a "cosmic sadist" or a "spiteful imbecile." When my stomach lurched at the call to prayer, it was because my soul needed to be able to say something more affirmative than that about God; to be able to say not only where God was not, but also and more importantly where God was.
And I couldn't. At least not honestly. Everything that came to mind out of my training, reflections and experience seemed inadequate, even repulsive. Things like, "God did not send the quake and flood, but God is near to us in the human grief it caused and in the compassion and healing that is growing in its aftermath." Yes, I believe that. But could we not have been spared the destruction altogether, and can we not learn compassion in some other way?
Things like, "God does not promise that life will be fair, or that nature will be benevolent, or that suffering will never touch us. God promises us ultimate safety. In life and in death, come what may, we are in loving hands." Yes, I believe that too. But what does safety mean when it has no bearing on our actual experience in the world right now, and when those supposedly loving hands don't feel particularly attentive to all this havoc and pain?
And so on I went down the list of possible explanations and theological considerations, each one leaving me empty—until I heard that poor man say, "No, not now. Now I do not have it in me to pray."
It was not an answer. It was not a solution or an explanation. But it rang true to me—this simple acknowledgement that there are times when we are simply unable to bear the thought of God, unable to give ourselves to God in trust, unable to accept that there is any moment but this awful moment, anything that exists outside our loss, anything that can be done but to endure it, to live through it.
And I began to think that if we are not at least that honest, our piety might only shield us from reality, our prayers might only be a game of "make nice," and our faith might only serve to separate us from our own humanity. Whether we contemplate the ravages of a tsunami, the carnage of war, the stupid waste of a death by drunk driving, or the intimate catastrophe of a loved one's untimely death, what matters is not so much our particular beliefs about God, but rather our capacity to be before God in our truth; to be human and real and to allow every question to rise, even if for some of us that means that what used to pass for faith in us is lost, and what replaces it is a permanent open-ended question.
I have no quarrel with the people who got up to go to Friday prayers. I am glad for them that they could go to God as the one who saves. I hope that many of us will too. But I found a great relief and blessing in that grieving man's refusal to worship God right now. A great relief and blessing. In his implicit refusal also to rule it out for later. A great relief and blessing in his simple confession that it is not up to him to know how and when and whether the conversation between him and God may be renewed. All he knows is that it isn't now. Not yet. Now he does not have it in him to pray.
We Christians sometimes find it hard to refrain from overwhelming great empty spaces and terrifying silences with hope-filled murmuring about God's love and abiding presence. We are people who count the resurrection of the Crucified One as the core of our faith. For us, hope is second nature, nothing is impossible, death is not the end. But when I heard that man say, "No, not now," I was reminded of an essay by Anthony Padovano that appeared on Good Friday ten or more years ago in which he urged Christians to take their time. It made a great impression on me, and I used it in a Good Friday reflection of my own in 1997. I want share some of it with you here.
I suspect that it will seem odd to reflect on Good Friday at Christmastime, but perhaps that is only because Christian sentimentality has made the babe in the manger sweet and his entry into our world glowing and glorious. We forget that he was born destitute, was quickly exiled, and that many mothers lost their infant sons in a bloodbath unleashed by Herod in an effort to destroy him. Perhaps it is not so odd after all to make a move from cradle to cross today. In any case, back then, with Padovano, I said:
There are times when Easter comes too quickly, when we get Jesus off the cross and into glory with unseemly dispatch. Perhaps this haste is "a reason why Easter is doubted by so many." There are times when the God of the lilies of the field and of all our carefully-counted hairs must repulse us. Times when, in the face of the vulgar horrors of our world and the intimate tragedies of our lives, an all-caring God is inadequate. Times when light is premature, when it hurts our eyes and does not heal. Times when we need the cover of night. Sooner or later, we all wonder with Job why we were ever born. Sooner or later, we all pore over the lexicon for a word with which to fashion inconsolable laments. And we find the cross, Christianity's "most believable symbol."
Christ crucified summons us to know a God more adequate to unremitting pain, which is to know everything and to know nothing. The death of God's Anointed in the early darkness is a key that "fits the lock, but does not open the door." The cross offers no answers. It offers instead a common lot. If Jesus' abandonment on the cross gives us Christians hope each year long before the stone is actually rolled away, it not because we know that he's on his way to rising—it's because we know that he is really dying. Just like us.
Sooner or later, life deposits us all at the cross. It is a gathering place for the world's sorrow, its wasted efforts, its tormented children, its unimaginable catastrophes, and its utter silences. When we arrive, we also discover its hope—"not the hope of Easter as such, but the hope that comes simply from having a place to gather when the pain is unspeakable and the sorrow beyond all bearing." At the cross, the gospel tells us, the whole cosmos lamented, the earth shook and the curtain of the Temple was torn in two. If at the cross creation grieves, then there is room for our grieving, too.
Brothers and sisters, we come here today on this Good Friday because it is not yet the dawn. We need to be healed, but not too fast. We have to wait. It takes time. And we have to stay together, too—with every loss and horror creation has ever borne. We have to stay together so that it is not too frightening to wait, so that our faithful waiting does not become despair.
We may even [like that inconsolable man in Indonesia] prefer to wait, just as long as we are not alone. In the company we are keeping here, in this holy communion, we just might outwait death and come startled and blinking to Easter.
But no, not now. Not yet.
© 2005, J Mary Luti