When suffering hits our world and those around us, when we’re in a place of the deepest pain, where is God? Why, so often, are our cries reciprocated with apparent silence?
I’ve wrestled with these questions. In that place of pain it’s like nothing fits anymore with what we thought, with our view of God and his nature. It’s like the foundations of our whole life seem unsteady. There were so many things we thought were safe absolutes, things we were certain of, but now there are so many questions, nothing fits anymore.
It’s like our faith up unto this point was a well ordered house. We knew where each piece of furniture belonged. We believed that there were certain precepts, concrete things known, but now it’s like a house turned upside down. There are no "knowns" anymore and few certainties. Just questions and contradictions…
C.S Lewis puts it like this:
"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."
If he exists, why does he abandon us in our times of greatest need? If he is good, why does our life experience leave evidence of apparent cruelty? It is in the midst of these times that I feel my faith slipping away from me. And like the character Mac in ‘The Shack’ by William P. Young, I am "sick of God and God’s religion, sick of all the little religious social clubs that don’t seem to make any real difference or affect real changes."
We’re banging on God’s door, but there are no lights in the windows. There is just silence. We begin to question if he was ever really there. And if not, what is this life we’ve been living?
In C.S Lewis’s book ‘The Problem of Pain’, we are invited to consider why, if God is good, He allows such pain in the world. Lewis wrote, “If God is good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy. If God is Almighty, He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.
"What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers we offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by all 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.”
I don’t have any answers, I have many questions and I don’t know if I’ll ever understand the apparent cruelty. In these times the currency of my prayers is so often tears. There are no words. I remember the exchange in 'The Magicians Nephew' between Aslan and the boy Digory whose mother was dying. When Digory first encounters Aslan he asked ‘please, Mr Lion, Aslan, Sir, could you... May I, please, will you give me some magic fruit of this country to make Mother well?’ He had been desperately hoping that the lion would say 'Yes'; he had been horribly afraid it might say 'No'. But he was taken aback when it did neither."
It is a desperate prayer and yet Aslan appears to ignore it completely. When God appears silent in response to our most desperate prayers, saying neither “Yes” or “No”, we naturally conclude that he doesn’t care, the door is slammed firmly in our face.
Later on in the story Digory asks Aslan for help again: "He thought of his Mother, and he thought of the great hopes he had had, and how they were all dying away, and a lump came in his throat and tears in his eyes, and he blurted out: 'But please, please – won’t you – can’t you give me something that will cure Mother?' Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great feet and the huge claws on them; now in his despair, he looked up at it’s face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lions eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.”
If you’re there you will come through it. So many have been there before you. Our dear Lord has been there before you. But while you’re waiting, when your prayers are raw and desperate yet there is silence and a bolted door, dare to look up at our dear Lord’s face, and you will see that it is bent down near your own and (wonder of wonders) there are great shining tears in His eyes. And know that though there are so many questions and so much pain he truly cares and is sorrier than we are ourselves.
