Our Abandonment by God – Why I Get Backlogged in Reading Religious Blogs

I decided to take a stab at the feeds today, and the first one I read was this one.. and it knocked me on my butt.

Now, while I am still often overwhelmed by the beauty and goodness of our world, I am also, or perhaps even more often, overwhelmed by the brokenness of our world.  Now, while I am still waiting for God to come and save us, I have grown accustomed to the experience that, for many (perhaps even most of us), God never shows up.  Now, I have seen things that are stronger than love — so while love can conquer all, it only rarely actually does so.  More often, death prevails.

Mostly, then, I think we awaken to the brokenness in our world and in ourselves and discover that we are alone.  We awaken to a world without God or, even if we continue to believe in God (as I do), we awaken to the realization that, when it comes to God, we have all been betrayed; we have all been abandoned.  We are, all of us, Georgia Lee lost and dying in a lonely place, waiting for the God who never comes.  Or who comes too late. we have all been betrayed, we have all been abandoned | On Journeying with Those in Exile

I will say that I don’t believe God will come save us.  I think we are left with that purpose.. it is something I have held onto from my Judaism – the world is indeed broken, so are we, but we are the hands and feet of God and we must repair it.  That doesn’t mean a lot in a moment of existential crisis but in the horror of this world I also find our freedom, and I take solace in that.  When I first read of Sartre’s ideas and how people found them so bleak, I was astonished because knowing I was on my own, knowing that my life was the result of my choices, made me feel better.

Perhaps it is also why I have always loved Hesse’s Steppenwolf – I can endure so much because I can choose to.

And this, and faith, is a magnification of this – I do not think God will come save us from our particular sufferings, but perhaps God saves us in giving us an answer to our sufferings, banal as it might be at times.  As empty an answer as it might be to some of the horrors that await in life, and as Daniel says on his blog – believing in God may not really be relevant to it at all, there are other ways to salvage our existence from this state – but it is the one for me.

I have experience of God and I can take solace in that relationship, even while I don’t believe that God will find me a job or heal me miraculously if I get cancer, it is this relationship that maintains me even while I suffer, and even while I see the broken world around me.  In this relationship, I have the freedom to act and that freedom is precious, even as it is monstrous.