The God I Long For
A few nights ago, I watched on our video camera as my husband got our one-year-old daughter to sleep. She was resisting—probably overtired—and I happened to witness a moment between them: my husband put his hand gently on her cheek to soothe her, and she clung to him even as her eyes grew heavy.
My husband and I are all the gods, demons, and fairies that my baby knows. We are her whole world, and when she cries out, she cries for us. My own cries, on the other hand, have become more involved. As our baby clung to her father, I ached with a longing that has characterized these postpartum months: I, too, want to reach up to my God and be assured of his presence, of his watchful care. I plead for my baby’s safety, knowing even as I pray that “time and chance happen to them all,”[1] and that my misfortune is just as likely as another’s. I hope to teach my daughter about faith, to nurture the seeds of hope and trust in the garden of her mind and heart. I hope, and it hurts to know that she will not always find comfort by reaching up and feeling a loving hand on her face.
I have heard a hundred times that parenting teaches us about God’s ultimate role of parent, but I hold my daughter in my arms and long to protect her from God’s silence, from God’s apparent inaction when action seems so desperately needed. I prematurely anticipate her questions, and my mouth goes dry coming up with answers.
O, child, I do not know.
I know that I look at the world, the beautiful, curious, mysterious, cruel world, and I feel grief. I feel grief that I cannot comfort every neglected child or feed every family scraping by without school lunches to rely on. I feel grief that I cannot stop every rape, protect every innocent child from sly and conniving men. I feel grief that people are dying alone in sections of the hospital cut off from the world. That millions are jobless and hopeless with families at home. That fires are consuming homes and feasting on forests. That mental illness tears minds apart and leaves families scarred and aching. I feel grief that this list barely begins to cover all that we as a human family have cause to mourn. I feel and I feel and I feel, and my prayers grow angry, bitter, skeptical as I try to discern the role of God in the human condition.
I want God to be like my husband, bent over the cradle to hold his beloved one close. I want to be sure that God is cradling the world in her long night of confusion and despair. I want to be certain of exactly how God is ministering to the sick and afflicted.
I have spent a long time believing that life is a test, a brief probationary period in which we are to perform a role and get a grade once the act is over. Well, this season, writers seem to be doing everything possible to renew humanity for another season. I find myself resistant to speaking the lines I’ve learned, tired of repeating the same things over and over for an unknown “finale.”
But what if life is not a test; what if, rather, life is a project?[2] It’s a subtle shift, but revolutionary for me. Instead of spewing forth memorized lines, I am building, creating, developing a face with which I can meet God. For how can we meet God face-to-face until we have faces? The struggles we face are not lessons to be learned, scripted and choreographed by a cruel puppeteer crafting our lives. They could instead be materials for the projects we are creating with our lives.
It may be that the God I long for, the God who responds to every cry and soothes every fear, is not a God at all, but an explanation, a mechanism of protection against the deep dive into mortal labor. Perhaps in imagining this god, in demanding this god, I am trying to escape actually living.
I don’t know if I will ever find a satisfactory explanation for the apparent intensity, cruelty, and injustice of suffering in this world, but I write all of this because perhaps it is time to release God from the great demand hedging up the way between us. If I can forgive the unknown, call the uncertainties by their names, perhaps I can learn to speak and receive in the language of mystery.
I want to be willing to look for teachers in this mortality. By this, I do not mean looking for proverbial lessons, as though God is an instructor handing out assignments with specific, constructed learning outcomes. I do not mean signing up for difficulty with a masochistic desire to “learn patience” or otherwise manipulate virtue out of mortality’s blind doling out of circumstance. I mean seeking instruction, guidance, mentoring from the raw materials of living. I mean building relationships with the unseen forces at work in existence, becoming a student of the mysterious. I would like to bend at the feet of Mother Earth and sense the weight of all she carries, to listen at foxholes for the laws of life and death, to fill my soul with awe at the churning of the sea and the fathomless depths teeming with unknown life. Perhaps then I can bend at the feet of the great God of heaven and earth and let the longing write my way forward, my way to the mountains.
This is to say: I believe in the living, in the laboring, in what these things create.
This is to say: the singing, I am certain, will never be done.[3]
[1] Ecclesiastes 9:11
[2] Stone, Bryan P. Evangelism after Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2007.
[3] Siegfried Sassoon, “Everyone Sang.” 1919. Accessed via https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57253/everyone-sang on April 19, 2021.
is invested in the work of recovering relationships—to the Earth, to each other, and to the Divine. Following a BA in philosophy, she worked in immigration law before following her hungry spirit to divinity school. Kristen is finishing a Master’s degree in Theology and hopes to practice chaplaincy. She and her husband have a delightsome one-year old.
Photograph © Jonathan Borba, used with permission
