Disappointments and Reminders

Finding reminders of goodness in a season of disappointment

Image Credit: https://images.app.goo.gl/57pMZjaGhijhEews8

Dear Friends,

At church this morning, we started a series on the book of Deuteronomy. It felt timely for me. For those who are not familiar with it, Deuteronomy is the swansong of the prophet Moses. After delivering the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt and through 40 years of wandering in the desert, Moses has finally brought his people to the Promised Land. However, Moses himself will not be able to see them enter into it. So, as his last act before exiting the stage on which he had played such a prominent role, Moses reminds the people of all that they have been through, all that they have learned, and all that they must remember to do. Deuteronomy is all about reminders: reminders of the past that point towards the future.

Lord knows that I need those reminders.

The past few weeks have been discouraging—more so than usual. In what seems to be a recurring pattern, Jenn’s work has basically dried up. It is almost enough to make me superstitious: at every agency that she has been hired to, the promise of abundant work evaporates like a mist or a mirage shortly after she arrives, and those at the agency are as bewildered as we are: “It’s never been this slow before! We just don’t understand it!”

What’s more, the skilled nursing facilities where Jenn signed up to work PRN as backup or insurance against just such an eventuality have also failed to come through.

Naturally, the financial insecurity of not having reliable income is stressful. We have other options—Jenn is applying to other jobs—but to be in this place again is immensely frustrating.

Image Credit: A Christmas Carol, 1:05:27

For me, though, this initial stress is compounded by the feeling of helplessness—impotence, even—at being unable to provide for my family. I identify with Ben, the despairing, bitter vagrant beneath a bridge in the version of A Christmas Carol that my family watched every Christmas Eve growing up, as he tells his wife, “Look at these hands, Meg. They’re hard hands; they’ve done hard work. I want to work. I want to get bread for my children.”

The parallel is not exact, of course; we are in no danger of starving, and materially, we live far more comfortably than not just the indigent Victorian castoffs but than Ebenezer Scrooge or even than old Queen Vicky herself. It would also be a romantic conceit to say that mine are “hard hands that have done hard work.” My brief stints at the Youth Conservation Corps in high school or as a house painter in college notwithstanding, any calluses that occasionally grace my hands are due to (regrettably inconsistent) attempts to do pullups, not manual labor.

But the feeling of helplessness, I do identify with. For all of my education and alleged talents, I cannot think of anything I would be qualified to do to earn money that would cover the cost of childcare while I was doing it. And though Jenn has noticed and expressed gratitude for my efforts to maintain the home front, inadequate though they might be, I know that she sometimes resents that I do not contribute more—something—anything—to the bottom line. In a society built on patriarchal foundations, where a man’s worth is largely measured in terms of his ability as a provider, that sense of inadequacy feels like a gut punch.

All this has exacerbated a kind of slow-burning crisis of faith.

I have largely come to peace with the big questions that are the rocks on which many a faith has foundered: how to reconcile faith with reason; how to understand how scripture can be both an inspired, eternal word of God, and also a temporal, historical, and very human document; how a loving, powerful God could coexist with the reality of evil (particularly when that evil comes at the hands of those who claim to serve that loving, powerful God). In some cases, I have come to answers that seem satisfactory, at least to myself. In most cases, I have learned to live with a tension in which easy answers prove elusive. Nonetheless, even as the amount that I know seems to shrink (it’s a pity that I don’t know half as much now as I thought I knew when I was 18) and even as the gauzy veil of mystery dims the sharp edges of dogmatic certainty, I still cannot intellectually escape from faith. With faith, there is much that I cannot understand; without it, there is nothing that I can.

But as a Christian, wrestling with faith involves more than working out philosophical or intellectual “big picture” questions; it has a more personal dimension, which Phillip Yancey pithily summed up as “Disappointment with God.” Disappointment is a deeply personal word. It is not a response to an abstraction. It is a relational feeling. It is the natural gut reaction to a person who has failed to meet our expectations.

As far as I can tell, this difficulty (at least in theory) is largely unique to Christianity. Anyone, of course, can be disappointed with circumstances, but it seems to me that only Christianity tends to turn those disappointing circumstances into a generalized disappointment with God. To the Muslim, any notion of “disappointment” with Allah is by turns inconceivable and blasphemous. In Islam, the relationship between God and man is a simple, non-reciprocal one of human submission to God (which is what “Islam” means in Arabic). Allah has left the Quran and the Five Pillars of Islam; it is the job of the faithful Muslim to learn the former and practice the latter. Anything disappointing that happens in this life can be ascribed to the inscrutable sovereignty of Allah, who is above it all, incomprehensibly orchestrating events like a cosmic chess master. Your job is to play your part in this game according to the rules that Allah has set, and you will receive your appropriate reward in the hereafter if not before.

Similarly, in most modern Judaism, G-d is a remote, distant figure (so distant and addressed with such reverence, in fact, that vowels must be removed from the Divine Name to show respect). He may have talked to Abraham and Moses face to face as a friend, but He hasn’t generally been in the business of granting theophanies for the past 2,500 years or so. So, in the absence of the presence of G-d, what Jews have to anchor their faith is tradition and Torah. Except for some mystical branches, the direct presence of G-d in lived Jewish experience—or, for more secular Jews, even the existence of G-d as a personal being—is largely superfluous. For this reason (somewhat bafflingly to Christians), for many Jews (as well as the state of Israel) there is no great contradiction between being a practicing Jew and an atheist. As long as the Jewish people, maintaining Jewish traditions and transmitting the Torah, continue to exist, then nothing—not even the Holocaust—can seriously call the foundations of Jewish faith into question.

For eastern religions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, there are even fewer grounds for “disappointment with God.” For one thing, there is no personal “God” to be disappointed in. Brahman—the “ground of being”—in most tellings is not personal, and so it can’t “disappoint” you any more than gravity does when it causes you to trip and fall. For another thing, there are no rational grounds for disappointment, because that would imply some disconnect between the way things are and the way they should be. In Hinduism and Buddhism, everything is theoretically as it should be: the combination of endless cycles of reincarnation and karma means that any experience, no matter how devastating or disappointing, can be explained as a cosmic rebalancing of the scales for some misdeed in some past life. Furthermore, if we accept with equanimity whatever the universe dishes out, we can hope for a reward in some future life, if not in this one.

Christianity, however, is different, because the cornerstone of its entire faith is the notion of Immanuel — “God with us.” Christianity posits that the one true God—the ruler of the whole universe—is not only personal but is personally with us. He is not only capable of relationship but desires a relationship that is mutually responsive.

The claim is bold enough that it bears restatement: Christianity claims that there is a single deity powerful enough to create, sustain, and govern the entire universe, and that this deity not only takes a great personal interest in the mostly hairless bipedal primates on a middling planet orbiting an average star—one of several hundred billion such stars in the galaxy, which is but one at least one hundred trillion galaxies in the visible universe—but is willing to be moved by the pleas of these upright apes to alter events to suit their needs.

This presents the Christian with some unique theological challenges. Animistic or primal religions certainly believe that the spirit realm and the natural world mutually influence each other, and consequently, religious rituals can influence the course of natural events. However, these spirits are local and parochial, not to mention capricious. Their failure to respond as one would have hoped or expected could be attributable to failing to appease the right spirit or trying to appease the right spirit in the wrong way. There is no need for a prolonged bout of wrestling with disappointment; if one fails to deliver, simply find another one.

On the other hand, for most of the “great faiths”, the “relationship” of the believer with the divine is almost entirely one-sided: the purpose of prayer (in the case of Judaism and Islam) or meditation (in the case of Buddhism and higher forms of Hinduism) is generally to bring oneself into conformity with the divine, not to persuade the divine to intervene on one’s behalf. Heaven (to the extent that it helps anyone) tends to help those who help themselves.

This quirk of Christianity—this insistence that God somehow takes a personal interest in us, not just as a species or a chosen collective of people, but as individuals—is incredibly attractive to our natural vanity. However, it also makes disappointment with God not only possible but inevitable. It turns every occasion of unanswered prayer into a silent but persuasive argument that either God is unable to intervene on our behalf (in spite of His promises to the contrary), or (worse) is able but unwilling.

This has been the essence of my struggle: how do I follow a God who, at least to my myopic eyes, does not seem to show up?

Deuteronomy provides the best and possibly only answer that there is to this quandary: reminders. The essence of faith is not wishful thinking; it is memory. It is the willful recollection of moments when we saw clearly, in the hope that one day there will come a time when we shall see clearly again.

I have had my share of reminders this week.

Since the beginning of the year, a friend and I have been reading through the Bible together. By Wednesday, I had fallen behind, so during the girls’ gymnastics classes, I took advantage of the free hour or so I had before Sophie and Jack drafted me to follow them through the jungle gym to catch up on a week’s reading. We were in Leviticus, which is not a particularly easy read. But though I didn’t see any immediate application to these detailed, repetitive instructions for the dismemberment of pigeons, or burning of the fat of ritually slaughtered lambs, or the correct procedure for donning priestly underwear, a strange thing had happened by the time I was dragged into the ball pit: my noisy soul had grown strangely quiet. It’s not the kind of miracle that would convince a skeptic (although, given the specific nature of this reading material, this reaction does seem borderline supernatural). However, it was the kind of quiet, almost inaudible reminder to soothe a skeptical soul.

Then, on Friday, I dragged myself out of bed to go to the men’s Bible study at church at six in the morning. We talked about the first 18 verses of Deuteronomy: the experience of being reminded of God’s presence in the wilderness. Afterwards, we broke into small groups to pray, and I shared our situation. Then, on Sunday morning, someone slipped an envelope to Jenn as she was walking to get the kids from Sunday school. In it was cash with a note that said, “Dear Michael and Jennifer, May the God of hope fill you with all Joy and Peace as you trust in Him, so that you will (may) overflow with hope by the Power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13.”

This, too, was a reminder.

In conclusion, I’m reminded of the movie Rudy. In one scene, the discouraged wannabe football player goes to his priest to process his doubt and frustration. The priest tells him, “Son, in 35 years of religious studies, I’ve come up with only two hard, incontrovertible facts. There is a God. And I’m not Him.” I used to think that this answer was an appalling indictment on the priest’s lack of faith. Now, I think it’s a good place to start.