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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
ECPA Christian Book of the Year Christianity Today Book of the Year Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist IVP Readers' Choice Award How can we trust God in the dark? Framed around a nighttime prayer of Compline, Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, explores themes of human vulnerability, suffering, and God's seeming absence. When she navigated a time of doubt and loss, the prayer was grounding for her. She writes that practices of prayer "gave words to my anxiety and grief and allowed me to reencounter the doctrines of the church not as tidy little antidotes for pain, but as a light in darkness, as good news." Where do we find comfort when we lie awake worrying or weeping in the night? This book offers a prayerful and frank approach to the difficulties in our ordinary lives at work, at home, and in a world filled with uncertainty.
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Prayerin theNight
For Those Who Workor Watch or Weep
To Raine, Flannery, and Augustine
May God keep watch with you throughevery dark night and teach you, day by day,that it is all for love’s sake.
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
Contents
Author’s Note
I AM FINISHING THIS BOOK in early Eastertide 2020 and sending it out to an uncertain world. A pandemic has spread around the globe, death tolls are mounting, and we in the United States have largely been under stay-at-home orders. I have chosen not to specifically address the pandemic in these pages. When I wrote this manuscript, Covid-19 did not exist. By the time this book is released, any reader will likely have far more insight into the reality of Covid-19 and its effects on the world than I could give here. What is needed now is the slow work of wisdom, and I am too near the outset of this tragedy to offer that in any detail.
But though I do not know what lies ahead, I know that whatever awaits us in this particular catastrophe, it will not be the last. We will face other natural disasters and global calamities. And there will be devastating yet more commonplace suffering that each reader will bring to these pages: personal stories of pain, vulnerability, anxiety, and loss that will continue long after the current crisis ends.
So I send this book out with a prayer that it will bear light and truth, and do the work it’s been given to do.
Prologue
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, covered in blood in an emergency room, I was praying.
We had lived in Pittsburgh for less than a month. Amid frigid nights and snow that had turned to gray slush, I was miscarrying.
Earlier that night, we had joined new acquaintances at their house for dinner. Their daughter went to school with ours. I was two days into the miscarriage, but my doctor had told me to go about the week as planned, so we went. As my husband, Jonathan, made the kind of awkward small talk you rehearse with near strangers, I began to have contractions. I felt like I couldn’t quite breathe. I asked to go to an urgent care clinic. I was trying to be breezy and undramatic—not the emergency room, but urgent care, the place where people go for stitches, no big deal.
Jonathan began to explain to our hosts that we had to end the evening early because, though we hadn’t mentioned it over dinner pleasantries, I was in the middle of a miscarriage, and while I was supposed to be bleeding slowly for a week, now I was bleeding quickly and in pain. I stood apologizing to our dinner hosts—because as a woman from the South, there is no awkward social situation in which I won’t compulsively apologize. Then, suddenly, I began gushing blood. Gushing. I looked like a gunshot victim.
Our hosts threw two towels to my husband, which he wrapped around me as I stumbled into the car, shouting, “Where is the hospital?” We left our children upstairs playing, without saying goodbye, with people whose last name we couldn’t quite remember.
It was dark out now. We wound through blurred city lights and hip college students walking to bars. On the way to the hospital I felt faint. Blood quickly soaked both towels as Jonathan offered panicked prayers: “Help her! Breathe. Oh God.” He ran all the red lights. He thought I was going to die on the way.
But we made it to the hospital. I was going to be okay, but I needed surgery.
The room filled with nurses, all commenting that this was way more blood than they usually saw, which should have been discomforting, except they seemed calm about it, even a bit fascinated, like I was a particularly well-done project at a school science fair. They put in a line for a blood transfusion, and told me to lie still. Then, I yelled to Jonathan, lost amidst the nurses, “Compline! I want to pray Compline.”
It isn’t normal—even for me—to loudly demand liturgical prayers in a crowded room in the midst of crisis. But in that moment, I needed it, as much as I needed the IV.
Relieved to have a direct command, Jonathan pulled up the Book of Common Prayer on his phone and warned the nurses, “We are both priests, and we’re going to pray now.” And then he launched in: “The Lord grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.”
Over the metronome beat of my heart monitor, we prayed the entire nighttime prayer service. I repeated the words by heart as waves of blood flowed from me with each contraction.
“Keep us as the apple of your eye.”
“Hide us under the shadow of your wing.”
“Lord have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.”
“Defend us, Lord, from the perils and dangers of this night.”
We finished: “The almighty and merciful Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bless us and keep us. Amen.”
“That’s beautiful,” one of the nurses said. “I’ve never heard that before.”
Why did I suddenly and desperately want to pray Compline underneath the fluorescent lights of a hospital room?
Because I wanted to pray but couldn’t drum up words.
It isn’t that “Help! Make the bleeding stop!” wasn’t holy or sophisticated enough. I was in a paper-thin hospital gown soaked with blood. This was not the time for formality. I wanted healing—but I needed more than just healing. I needed this moment of crisis to find its place in something greater: the prayers of the church, yes, but more, the vast mystery of God, the surety of God’s power, the reassurance of God’s goodness.
I had to decide again, in that moment, when I didn’t know how things would turn out, with my baby dead and my body broken, whether these things I preached about God loving me and being for me were true. Yet I was bone-weary. I was heartbroken. I could not conjure up spontaneous and ardent faith.
My decision about whether to trust God wasn’t merely an exercise of cognition. I wasn’t trying to pass some Sunday School pop quiz. I was trying to enter into truth that was large enough to hold my own frailty, vulnerability, and weak faith—a truth as deniable as it is definite. But how, worn out with tears and blood, in a place without words and without certainty, could I reach for that truth?
That night, I held to the reality of God’s goodness and love by taking up the practices of the church. Specifically by taking up prayer, the liturgy of the hours.
For most of church history, Christians understood prayer not primarily as a means of self-expression or an individual conversation with the divine, but as an inherited way of approaching God, a way to wade into the ongoing stream of the church’s communion with him.1 In that moment in the hospital, I was not trying to “express my faith,” to announce my wavering devotion to a room full of busy nurses. Nor was I trying to call down (in the words of Richard Dawkins) my “sky fairy” to come save me.2 Through prayer I dared to believe that God was in the midst of my chaos and pain, whatever was to come. I was reaching for a reality that was larger and more enduring than what I felt in the moment.
Every prayer I have ever prayed, from the most faithful to the least, has been in part a confession uttered in the Gospel of Mark: “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). That was my prayer as I repeated the well-worn words of Compline that night. And as countless nights before, the church, in the midst of my weakness, responded with her ancient voice: “Here are some words. Pray them. They are strong enough to hold you. These will help your unbelief.”
Faith, I’ve come to believe, is more craft than feeling. And prayer is our chief practice in the craft.
This is not to say that a relationship with God is something we accomplish by effort, or that there’s a hierarchy of Christian achievement where an elite group excels at faith like some excel at sewing or basketball. Grace is the first and last word of the Christian life, and all of us are desperately in need of mercy and are deeply loved.
Faith comes as a gift. And any artisan will tell you that there is something miraculous about their craft. Madeline L’Engle said that any good work of art is more and better than the artist. Shakespeare, she said, “wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew; Rembrandt’s brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend.”3 A gardener cannot make daffodils grow, nor can a baker force the alchemic glory of yeast and sugar. And yet we are given means of grace that we can practice, whether we feel like it or not, and these carry us. Craftsmen—writers, brewers, dancers, potters—show up and work, and they participate in a mystery. They take up a craft, again and again, on bad days and good, waiting for a flash of mercy, a gift of grace.
In our deepest moments of anxiety and darkness, we enter into this craft of prayer, at times trembling and feeble. Most often, we take up prayer not out of triumphant victory or unimpeachable trust but because prayer shapes us; it works back on us to change who we are and what we believe. Patterns of prayer draw us out of ourselves, out of our own time-bound moment, into the long story of Christ’s work in and through his people over time.4
Faith, I’ve come to believe, is more craft than feeling. And prayer is our chief practice in the craft.
As I prayed that night, I wanted to believe the things I proclaimed: that God knew and loved me, that this terrible moment, too, would be redeemed. I believed it and I didn’t. Reaching for this old prayer service was an act of hope that it would put me under the knife, work in me like surgery, set things right in my own heart. I may as well have said, “Compline. STAT.”
1
Finding Compline
Nightfall
IT WAS A DARK YEAR IN EVERY SENSE. It began with the move from my sunny hometown, Austin, Texas, to Pittsburgh in early January. One week later, my dad, back in Texas, died in the middle of the night. Always towering and certain as a mountain on the horizon, he was suddenly gone.
A month later, I miscarried and hemorrhaged, and we prayed Compline in the ER.
Grief had compounded. I was homesick. The pain of losing my dad was seismic, still rattling like aftershocks. It was a bleak season—we named it, as a grim joke, the “Pitts-of-despair-burgh.”
The next month we found out we were pregnant again. It felt like a miracle. But early on I began bleeding, and the pregnancy became complicated. I was put on “medically restricted activity.” I couldn’t stand for long periods, walk more than a couple blocks, or lift anything above ten pounds, which meant I couldn’t lift my then four-year-old. As I spent hours sitting in bed each day, my mind grew dimmer and darker. The bleeding continued near-constantly for two months, with weekly trips to the hospital when it picked up so much that we worried I was miscarrying or in danger of another hemorrhage. In the end, in late July, early in my second trimester, we lost another baby, a son.
During that long year, as autumn brought darkening days and frost settled in, I was a priest who couldn’t pray.
I didn’t know how to approach God anymore. There were too many things to say, too many questions without answers. My depth of pain overshadowed my ability with words. And, more painfully, I couldn’t pray because I wasn’t sure how to trust God.
Martin Luther wrote about seasons of devastation of faith, when any naive confidence in the goodness of God withers. It’s then that we meet what Luther calls “the left hand of God.”1 God becomes foreign to us, perplexing, perhaps even terrifying.
Adrift in the current of my own doubt and grief, I was flailing. If you ask my husband about 2017, he says simply, “What kept us alive was Compline.”
An Anglicization of completorium, or “completion,” Compline is the last prayer office of the day. It’s a prayer service designed for nighttime.2
Imagine a world without electric light, a world lit dimly by torch or candle, a world full of shadows lurking with unseen terrors, a world in which no one could be summoned when a thief broke in and no ambulance could be called, a world where wild animals hid in the darkness, where demons and ghosts and other creatures of the night were living possibilities for everyone. This is the context in which the Christian practice of nighttime prayers arose, and it shapes the emotional tenor of these prayers.
For much of history, night was simply terrifying.
Roger Ekirch begins his fascinating history of nighttime by saying, “It would be difficult to exaggerate the suspicion and insecurity bred by darkness.”3 In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke said there was no other “idea so universally terrible in all times, and in all countries, as darkness.”4 Shakespeare’s Lucrece famously laments the “comfort-killing night, image of hell.”5
Nighttime is also a pregnant symbol in the Christian tradition. God made the night. In wisdom, God made things such that every day we face a time of darkness. Yet in Revelation we’re told that at the end of all things, “night will be no more” (Revelation 22:5; cf. Isaiah 60:19). And Jesus himself is called a light in the darkness. He is the light that darkness cannot overcome.
The sixteenth-century Saint John of the Cross coined the phrase “the dark night of the soul” to refer to a time of grief, doubt, and spiritual crisis, when God seems shadowy and distant.6 The reason this resonates with us is because night typifies our fears and doubts—“the hard day of the soul” or “the gray morning of the soul” would never have had the same staying power.
And in a darkness so complete that it’s hard for us to now imagine, Christians rose from their beds and prayed vigils in the night. The third-century North African theologian Tertullian refers to “assemblies at night” in which families would rise from their sleep to pray together.7 In the East, Basil the Great instructed Christians that “at the beginning of the night we ask that our rest be without offense . . . and at this hour also Psalm [91] must be recited.”8 Long after night vigils ceased to be a regular practice among families, monks continued to pray through the small hours, rising in the middle of the night to sing Psalms together, staving off the threat of darkness. Centuries of Christians have faced their fears of unknown dangers and confessed their own vulnerability each night, using the dependable words the church gave them to pray.
Of course, not all of us feel afraid at night. I have friends who relish nighttime—its stark beauty, its contemplative quiet, its space to think and pray.9 Anne Brontë begins her poem “Night” declaring, “I love the silent hour of night.”10
There is much to love about the night. Nightingale song and candlelight, the sparkling city or the crackling of a fire as stars slowly creep across the sky, the sun descending into the horizon silhouetting a reddened sky. Yet each of us begins to feel vulnerable if the darkness is too deep or lasts too long. It is in large part due to the presence of light that we can walk around without fear at night. With the flick of a switch, we can see as well as if we were in daylight. But go out into the woods or far from civilization, and we still feel the almost primordial sense of danger and helplessness that nighttime brings.
In deep darkness, even the strongest among us are small and defenseless.
Despite modernity’s buzzing light bulbs and twenty-four-hour drive-throughs, we nonetheless face our vulnerability in a unique way as darkness falls. There’s a reason horror movies are usually set at night. We still speak of the “witching hour.” And poet John Rives, the curator of The Museum of Four in the Morning, a website that archives literary and pop culture references to 4 a.m., calls it the “worst possible hour of the day.”11 These wee hours, he says, are a popular shorthand infused with meaning across genres, cultures, and centuries.
Night is not just hours on the clock. How many of us lie awake at night, unable to fall back asleep, worrying over the day ahead, thinking of all that could go wrong, counting our sorrows?
Our very bodies confront darkness each night. So each night we practice facing our truest state: we are exposed, we cannot control our lives, we will die.
In the daylight, I’m distracted. At moments, even productive.
At night I feel alone, even in a house full of sleeping bodies. I feel small and mortal.
The darkness of nighttime amplifies grief and anxiety. I’m reminded with the setting of the sun that our days are numbered, and full of big and little losses.
We are all so very, very vulnerable.
Every twenty-four hours, nighttime gives us a chance to practice embracing our own vulnerability.
We can speak of vulnerability as something we choose. We decide whether to “let ourselves” be vulnerable through sharing or withholding our truest selves—our stories, opinions, or feelings. In this sense, vulnerability means emotional exposure or honesty. But this isn’t the kind of vulnerability I mean. Instead, I mean the unchosen vulnerability that we all carry, whether we admit it or not. The term vulnerable comes from a Latin word meaning “to wound.”12 We are wound-able. We can be hurt and destroyed, in body, mind, and soul. All of us, every last man, woman, and child, bear this kind of vulnerability till our dying day.
And every twenty-four hours, nighttime gives us a chance to practice embracing our own vulnerability.13
I don’t remember when I began praying Compline. It didn’t begin dramatically. I’d heard Compline sung many times in darkened sanctuaries where I’d sneak in late and sit in silence, listening to prayers sung in perfect harmony.
In a home with two priests, copies of the Book of Common Prayer are everywhere, lying around like spare coasters. So one night, lost in the annals of forgotten nights, I picked it up and prayed Compline.
And then I kept doing it. I began praying Compline more often, barely registering it as any kind of new practice. It was just something I did, not every day, but a few nights a week, because I liked it. I found it beautiful and comforting.
A pattern of monastic prayer was largely set by Benedict and his monks in the sixth century. They prayed eight times a day: Matins (before dawn), Lauds (at sunrise), then Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers throughout the day (each about three hours apart). Finally, at bedtime, Compline.14
The Anglican Book of Common Prayer condensed these eight canonical hours into two prayer “offices,” morning and evening prayer. But some Anglicans (as well as lay Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and others) continued to have fixed night prayers. Eventually, in Anglican prayer books these two prayer offices were expanded to four, adding vespers and a Compline service.15
Like most prayer offices, Compline includes a confession, a reading from the Psalms and other Scriptures, written and responsive prayers, and a time for silence or extemporaneous prayer.
For most of my life, I didn’t know there were different kinds of prayer. Prayer meant one thing only: talking to God with words I came up with. Prayer was wordy, unscripted, self-expressive, spontaneous, and original. And I still pray this way, every day. “Free form” prayer is a good and indispensable way to pray.
But I’ve come to believe that in order to sustain faith over a lifetime, we need to learn different ways of praying. Prayer is a vast territory, with room for silence and shouting, for creativity and repetition, for original and received prayers, for imagination and reason.
I brought a friend to my Anglican church and she objected to how our liturgy contained (in her words) “other people’s prayers.” She felt that prayer should be an original expression of one’s own thoughts, feelings, and needs. But over a lifetime the ardor of our belief will wax and wane. This is a normal part of the Christian life. Inherited prayers and practices of the church tether us to belief, far more securely than our own vacillating perspective or self-expression.
Prayer forms us. And different ways of prayer aid us just as different types of paint, canvas, color, and light aid a painter.
When I was a priest who could not pray, the prayer offices of the church were the ancient tool God used to teach me to pray again. Stanley Hauerwas explains his love for praying “other people’s prayers”: “Evangelicalism,” he says, “is constantly under the burden of re-inventing the wheel and you just get tired.” He calls himself an advocate for practicing prayer offices because,
We don’t have to make it up. We know we’re going to say these prayers. We know we’re going to join in reading of the psalm. We’re going to have these Scripture readings. . . . There’s much to be said for Christianity as repetition and I think evangelicalism doesn’t have enough repetition in a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new.16
When we pray the prayers we’ve been given by the church—the prayers of the psalmist and the saints, the Lord’s Prayer, the Daily Office—we pray beyond what we can know, believe, or drum up in ourselves. “Other people’s prayers” discipled me; they taught me how to believe again. The sweep of church history exclaims lex orandi, lex credendi, that the law of prayer is the law of belief.17 We come to God with our little belief, however fleeting and feeble, and in prayer we are taught to walk more deeply into truth.
When we pray the prayers we’ve been given by the church—the prayers of the psalmist and the saints, the Lord’s Prayer, the Daily Office—we pray beyond what we can know, believe, or drum up in ourselves.
When my strength waned and my words ran dry, I needed to fall into a way of belief that carried me. I needed other people’s prayers.
When my own dark night of the soul came in 2017, nighttime was terrifying. The stillness of night heightened my own sense of loneliness and weakness. Unlit hours brought a vacant space where there was nothing before me but my own fears and whispering doubts. I’d stare at the hard, undeniable facts that anyone I loved could die that night, and that everyone I love will die someday—facts we most often ignore so we can make it through the day intact.
So I’d fill the long hours of darkness with glowing screens, consuming mass amounts of articles and social media, binge-watching Netflix, and guzzling think pieces till I collapsed into a fitful sleep. When I tried to stop, I’d sit instead in the bare night, overwhelmed and afraid. Eventually I’d begin to cry and, feeling miserable, return to screens and distraction—because it was better than sadness. It felt easier, anyway. Less heavy.
The mechanics of my nightly internet consumption were the same as those of the addict: faced with grief and fear, I turned to something to numb myself. When I compulsively opened up my computer, I’d go for hours without thinking about death or my dad or miscarriages or homesickness or my confusion about God’s presence in the midst of suffering.
I began seeing a counselor. When I told her about my sadness and anxiety at night, she challenged me to turn off digital devices and embrace what she called “comfort activities” each night—a long bath, a book, a glass of wine, prayer, silence, journaling maybe. No screens. I fell off the wagon probably a hundred times in as many days.
But slowly I started to return to Compline.
I needed a comfort that looked unflinchingly at loss and death.
I needed words to contain my sadness and fear. I needed comfort, but I needed the sort of comfort that doesn’t pretend that things are shiny or safe or right in the world. I needed a comfort that looked unflinchingly at loss and death. And Compline is rung round with death.
It begins “The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.” A perfect end of what? I’d think—the day, the week? My life? We pray, “Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit”—the words Jesus spoke as he was dying. We pray, “Be our light in the darkness, O Lord, and in your great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night,” because we are admitting the thing that, left on my own, I go to great lengths to avoid facing: there are perils and dangers in the night. We end Compline by praying, “That awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.” Requiescat in pace. RIP.
Compline speaks to God in the dark. And that’s what I had to learn to do—to pray in the darkness of anxiety and vulnerability, in doubt and disillusionment. It was Compline that gave words to my anxiety and grief and allowed me to reencounter the doctrines of the church not as tidy little antidotes for pain, but as a light in darkness, as good news.
When we’re drowning we need a lifeline, and our lifeline in grief cannot be mere optimism that maybe our circumstances will improve because we know that may not be true. We need practices that don’t simply palliate our fears or pain, but that teach us to walk with God in the crucible of our own fragility.
During that difficult year, I didn’t know how to hold to both God and the awful reality of human vulnerability. What I found was that it was the prayers and practices of the church that allowed me to hold to—or rather to be held by—God when little else seemed sturdy, to hold to the Christian story even when I found no satisfying answers.
There is one prayer in particular, toward the end of Compline, that came to contain my longing, pain, and hope. It’s a prayer I’ve grown to love, that has come to feel somehow like part of my own body, a prayer we’ve prayed so often now as a family that my eight-year-old can rattle it off verbatim:
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
This prayer is widely attributed to St. Augustine,18 but he almost certainly did not write it. It seems to suddenly appear centuries after Augustine’s death. A gift, silently passed into tradition, that allowed one family at least to endure this glorious, heartbreaking mystery of faith for a little longer.
As I said this prayer each night, I saw faces. I would say “bless the dying” and imagine the final moments of my father’s life, or my lost sons. I would pray that God would bless those who work and remember the busy nurses who had surrounded me in the hospital. I would say “shield the joyous” and think of my daughters sleeping safely in their room, cuddled up with their stuffed owl and flamingo. I’d say “soothe the suffering” and see my mom, newly widowed and adrift in grief on the other side of the country. I’d say “give rest to the weary” and trace the worry lines on my husband’s sleeping face. And I would think of the collective sorrow of the world, which we all carry in big and small ways—the horrors that take away our breath, and the common, ordinary losses of all our lives.
Like a botanist listing different oak species along a trail, this prayer lists specific categories of human vulnerability. Instead of praying in general for the weak or needy, we pause before particular lived realities, unique instances of mortality and weakness, and invite God into each.
This book is a meditation on this beloved prayer. It’s about how to continue to walk the way of faith without denying the darkness. It’s about the terrible yet common suffering we each shoulder, and what trusting God might mean in the midst of it.19
2
Keep Watch, Dear Lord
Pain and Presence
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I was afraid of what lurks in the dark—monsters in the closet, ghostly sounds of branches scratching the roof, bad guys just beyond the door.
Back then, I could bolt from my bed and wedge myself between my sleeping mom and dad. But now that I’m the grown up with my own five-year-old who squirms her way into our bed each night, where is my safe place? Imagined monsters in the closet seem easier to hide from than the fear of cancer or the throb of disappointment or the loss of a job or the hard conversations that I replay in my mind or my uncertainty about how to parent my kids or live life well or trust God.
The band Over the Rhine has a song that asks, “Who will guard the door when I am sleeping?”1 Each night I ask that question. Is anyone watching out for me?
What does it mean for God to keep watch with us?
Amid thousands of forgotten sermons in my life, there is one sentence in one sermon that I’ll never forget.
It was a gray Sunday morning when I was in college. A few months before, a three-year-old boy in our congregation had drowned. Our church was still staggered in grief as I sat listening to my pastor, Hunter, preach about trusting God. “You cannot trust God to keep bad things from happening to you,” he said. I was dumbstruck.
What Hunter said is self-evident. Bad things happen all the time, and I knew that then as I do now. But what he said was also devastating. In some wordless place deep within, I had hoped that God would keep bad things from happening to me—that it was somehow his job to do so, that he owed me that much. The plain truth of what Hunter said stood before me, obvious and terrible.
Of course, God does keep many bad things from happening to us. We do not know all the unnoticed ways we’ve been spared some misery—the accidents we weren’t in, the injuries we just avoided, the destructive relationships we never began, the diseases our white blood cells silently snuffed from our bodies unbeknownst to us.
But if God cannot be trusted to keep bad things from happening to us, how can he be trusted at all?
But Hunter’s point was that God does not keep all bad things from happening to us. He cannot be trusted to do that because he never made that promise. Doing so is, apparently, not his job. Our Creator lets us remain vulnerable.
But if God cannot be trusted to keep bad things from happening to us, how can he be trusted at all?
This was the question that I couldn’t shake, the question that haunted the empty silence of the night.
In 2017, after months of talk about grief and loss, about my parents and my marriage, about body trauma and depression, about nighttime and “comfort activities,” my counselor looked at me and asked, “Where is God in all of this?”
Could I believe that God cares about me when he doesn’t stop bad things from happening? Could I trust him when I’m terrified that he will let me, or those I love, hurt? When I look across the immense collective sadness of the world, can I still know God as kind or loving? Is anyone looking out for us? Is anyone keeping watch?
The theological struggle I was facing has a long history and a name: theodicy.
Theodicy names the abstract “problem of pain”—the logical dilemma of how God can be good and all-powerful even as horrible things regularly happen in the world. And it also names the crisis of faith that often comes from an encounter with suffering.2
This wasn’t the first time that I’d wrestled with theodicy. But our difficult year—and perhaps simply growing older—made unresolved questions return with a vengeance and howl through the long, dark night.
Theodicy is not merely a cold philosophical conundrum. It is the engine of our grimmest doubts. It can sometimes wither belief altogether. A recent survey showed that the most commonly stated reason for unbelief among Millennials and Gen Z-ers was that they “have a hard time believing that a good God would allow so much evil or suffering in the world.”
This is an increasingly common struggle. More young people voice frustration and confusion about theodicy now than in the last several generations.3 Many of those who walk into agnosticism or atheism do so not out of any reasoned proof (since there is no irrefutable proof for or against God’s existence) but out of a deep sense that, if there is a God, he (or she or it) cannot be trusted. This is unbelief as protest.4 In Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, his character Hamm rejects the existence of God with the quip, “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”5
If there is no God, the problem of pain vanishes. In his book Unapologetic, Francis Spufford points out that “in the absence of God, of course, there’s still pain. But there’s no problem. It’s just what happens.”6 But, he says,
Once the God of everything is there in the picture, and the physics and biology and history of the world become in some ultimate sense His responsibility, the lack of love and protection in the order of things begins to shriek out. . . . The only easy way out of the problem is to discard the expectation that causes the problem, by ditching the author Himself.7
