God, and grief, and suffering

As I look forward to the imminent arrival of a new baby, the loss of my second pregnancy weighs on me. Even as I look forward to this life with hopes and dreams, I still grieve that life, those hopes, those dreams. I very much want this baby, but I wanted that baby, too. I deeply love this baby, and still I deeply love that baby. Some days, my heart becomes heavy with grief.

Even so, while the loss of that life is sad, it was not tragic. Not tragic in the way that Trayvon Martin's death was tragic. Not tragic in the way that the deaths of 19 fire fighters in service was tragic. Not tragic in the way that the deaths of an estimated 1,570 children from abuse or neglect in the US in 2011, or that the deaths of an estimated 25,000 people every day worldwide of hunger-related causes are tragic. We all know stories of less-public tragedies also: the woman who became pregnant after years of trying, only to lose the baby to SIDS. The children whose parents were both killed when a drunk driver hit their car head-on. The family for whom a job loss leads to home loss and illness and the inability to pay for medical care. The child who just happened to be standing in the "wrong place," shot and killed in gang cross-fire. These are true tragedies. Some days, my heart feels as though it will break with grief.

It seems to me that life should be more fair than this. That karma or the universe or God should make it so that only one bad thing can happen in a person's life, or can happen at any given time. As so many of us do, I wonder, "Where is God in all of this? What is God doing? Why doesn't God stop these things?" Much theological and Biblical study has led me to an understanding of God that goes deeper than simply 'free will' or 'chaos' or 'sin and evil.' I believe that we want God to be capable of stopping the world and fixing everything, but I don't believe that is what the Biblical witness of God's character actually teaches us. Rather, I believe God continuously creates, continuously cares, continuously draws us and all of creation toward the good, but rather than coercing certain behaviors or belief empowers us to live into the image of the Divine in whom we were made. Thus, I had come to the conclusion that when tragedy comes, or even just our own personal griefs overtake us, that God suffers with us. God comes to us, stays with us, cries with us. Even when hidden, God is present in our suffering, our tragedies, our grief.

God certainly suffers. Through Jesus, we know that God has felt inside a body the grief of a friend dying. We know that Jesus experienced his own suffering of mind and body through the tragic miscarriage of justice that led to his death. We know that Jesus' soul suffered when he begged of God, "Why have you abandoned me?" The Bible also reminds us that God constantly labors, as she brings new life and creativity into the world. Through constant creation, God labors painfully, just as any woman does - with hope and excitement and expectation and anxiety. She must wonder, 'will this child live into my hopes for her?' 'Will this earth that has grown in my womb survive?' 'Will this insect that I have so carefully designed find a mate before he dies?' I do not believe that labor pains are suffering, but they are not easy, either. Yet God continues to choose this pain, this anxiety, this unknowing, in order to bring life into the world.

As anyone who loves a child knows, after children are birthed, you have so little control over them. As you love a child, you continue to hope for the best you can imagine for him. Sometimes you get to watch him fly, and other times you watch him sink. Poor grades, a friend's death, the trap of drug addiction, a mental illness that overtakes him, a poor decision that ends up in a prison term. Surely God must watch her creation with all these sames hopes and anxieties -- which parts will fly, which  will sink, which will live to be redeemed? God, too, must experience the pain of watching those she loves sink away from their own light and into something almost unrecognizable. And still, God chooses this pain. She chooses to suffer because she chooses to create, and to love.

And yet, in the midst of deep grief, it now feels inadequate that God suffers with us. Aware of the many ways that I and others and creation itself fail to live up to the divine image in which we were made, it is not enough that God knows of this and walks beside me in it. On the one hand, it feels good to have someone "on my side," to hope for a resurrection and redemption that I know God can somehow manage. But in the midst of this kind of grief, that simply is not enough. In Night, Elie Weisel remembers a child who has been hanged, and when someone asks, "Where is God in this?" the response was: "God is there, hanging on the gallows." The fact that God was with that child in that horror was not enough to bring resurrection. God's simple presence was not enough to bring redemption.

Yet the Bible witnesses again and again that grace, resurrection, and redemption are who God is. God's very being lives into those continual labor pains, bringing about creativity and new life, mending brokenness and calming chaos. How can we hold this paradox: that God's being cannot help but create and redeem, and yet so much in the world or even our lives feels un-redeemable? What do we say when God's simple presence in our grieving is not enough?


I am beginning now to wonder if it isn't God who suffers with us, but we who suffer with God. Perhaps suffering is not a part of our human condition, but instead a part of the Divine within. Perhaps we, like God, choose to suffer -- because we choose to create life, to care, to love, to watch and listen and live -- and in doing those things we live into who God has created us to be, in God's very own image. We too become sufferers on account of a broken, sinful world. A world which continuously allows evil to break in. Maybe the very image of God within us invites us not only into the joy of being, but into the grief of loving.

Perhaps that is where the redemption happens. Not that God alone coerces events into some way of being "better," but that through our work with God and each other, we empower more creativity and new life. Maybe we, too, become aware of the little births that happen each day in creation -- a smile, a flower, a budding relationship. Perhaps past events themselves don't become redeemed, but we do. In pulling together, in crying out for justice, in motivating our neighborhoods to care for creation, in caring for people who have lost those they love, in continuously creating small spaces where God's creative, resurrecting, redeeming love brings new birth within. Perhaps we choose this, too, when we choose to suffer. As we live into the divine within us, opening space for her to shine through, we open a space for redemption for our suffering. A place where we meet grief and God and know this grieving is our work, too. Where it is not only God's job to comfort us, but perhaps that we and God sit together in our grief and tears, holding hands and saying nothing and waiting for that divine spark to create between us a new space of healing grace. And sometimes, perhaps it is we who put our arms around God herself and hold her while she cries tears from the deepest part of herself for all that she, too, has loved, and lost, and waits to be redeemed.