Not Now
For my life is spent with sorrow, my years with sighing. I am an object of dread to my [friends]; I have passed out of mind like one who is dead. – Psalm 31:10-12 abridged (NRSV)
The day after the 2005 South Asian tsunami, I watched a reporter interview some survivors. In the background, a muzzein called the faithful to prayer. The reporter asked, “Are you going?” Some nodded and got up. But one man, who’d lost his entire family, shook his head. “No,” he said, “not now. Now I do not have it in me to pray.”
His “no” struck me as a theological necessity, a moment of accountability. To keep God out of it, at least for now, was to lay bare a truth that piety often papers over: that there are times when the very thought of God is unbearable, when there’s no moment but this awful moment, when nothing exists outside this monstrous loss, when nothing is real but pain.
In such moments, convictions about God—God didn’t cause this, God is with us in suffering, all will be well—matter less than the capacity to be nakedly truthful, even if it means that what once passed for faith in us is lost, and what replaces it is a permanent open-ended question.
Christians tend to overwhelm great blank spaces with hopeful assurances: we are Easter people, after all. But sometimes human suffering demands that we respect its despair and not hurry it to hope. Our haste to get Jesus off the cross and into glory may be a reason Easter is doubted by so many.
Someday that man may pray again. But the mystery of his suffering forbids us even to wonder. Not now. Now the silence, now the stripped and vacant heart.
Prayer
Save me from piety that disallows my neighbor’s despair, the hasty faith that makes Easter easier to doubt.
About the AuthorMary Luti is a long time seminary educator and pastor, author of Teresa of Avila’s Way and numerous articles, and founding member of The Daughters of Abraham, a national network of interfaith women’s book groups.