Appalling strangeness
God's goodness and our suffering
Graham Greene wrote of “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God”. Words that the evangelical in me, small though he may be these days, finds troubling. I’ve been taught to think of God’s grace as simple, learned to formulate mercy in a systematic way, without ever wanting to read Wayne Grudem. It’s just something you pick up. It’s in the water. In the grape juice at Communion: this stripping of uncertainty and ambiguity from the nature of Grace. God is good, and there is one simple way to get to Him, to understand Him, to live. How could that be appalling or strange?
“Strangeness” suggests an unpredictability that is at odds with the reduction of God to and equation of inputs and outcomes (pray this prayer, get this reward). With our pride at having discovered the secret, stable structure of things (it is only through this prayer that you are saved). We worship certainty alongside our God. Certainty requires accessibility and familiarity. And yet followers of Christ for millennia have spoken of mystery. God, for many of our sisters and brothers below and above ground, was impossible to fully understand. We resent the idea that God is strange. Or, at least, I do.
“Appalling” conflicts with something deeper, something that we need: a comfort and a sense of safety that is harder to sneer at than rationalised metaphysics. God is our buddy and our dad, but also our safe refuge. He is always good.
But if we are brave enough to admit it, to be ‘good’, for God, can’t mean the same things that it does for us. God isn’t built of frailties, He harbours no traumas, He is not hemmed in by orders to behave. When it comes to God, I’m not sure that we know what goodness means. Unless we take Him as the starting point. And there is something appalling and strange about that.
I avoid thinking about these things most of the time. I drink coffee and scroll through social media, liking and commenting and seeking amusement or affirmation. That’s one reason why, when I see the posts of people I half know who are suffering or long-term sick, I tend to scud on by without being pulled into sadness, or guilt. I don’t want to wonder why the God I know to be real is letting this happen. I prefer disappointment with systems. I’m better with things I can blame on capitalism.
This week, I saw a post by someone I’d been half avoiding for these reasons. Long-term sick, enduring a life I don’t want to imagine. Neither a friend nor acquaintance – less than both these things to me if I’m honest – just someone who crossed my path a few times years ago. The post was a selfie, an understated, unpolished portrait of a moment, quickly captured, with a few lines about her pain. She looked so tired.
Over the years I’ve seen her struggle with chemotherapy and clashing medications and the little things she did to make being alive just a little less awful. In the photo, she looked older than she should have. And perhaps I thought she looked worn down, because that’s how I would be after years of having normal life stripped away and pleasures measured out in drips.
I stopped scrolling at her picture. I don’t know if it was the small depression I’m walking through, or the cumulative pity I have collected for her story – in those photo captions that I bothered to read over the years – or if there was another reason. But I stopped and prayed and began to cry. More than I’d expected to. I was weeping in a way I usually reserve for myself, or for abstract suffering and the nonverbal, unconscious pain I have never learned to exorcise. I was praying desperately for a person I neither knew nor loved well, my hand hovering over her picture in a way I don’t think I’ve prayed before.
I am rarely angry with God, but my feeling, my tone, was not respectful – and I think at one point I prayed out loud: God, please. Stop this. Just have mercy. And if this seems like I am making her suffering about me, that is a fair criticism. But I was for once thinking of her, of the desires abandoned for a longer life orbiting hospitals. The fear and horror of circling the low walls of churchyards, even for the believer. The changes to a body that was not her friend and the sickness and tiredness in her unpretending face. The awfulness I prefer not to be troubled by, usually.
I don’t think praying for her or properly feeling compassion once in many years makes me a good Christian, nor do I feel I’ve been granted special wisdom between someone else’s stirrup and ground. I’m telling you this because later, after I had gone on with my day, the tendrils of lingering prayer still hanging on (asking God, between the other daily thoughts, to please be kind to her, please have mercy), and then dissolving, I saw another post. She had died, not shockingly but unexpectedly, that day.
I have never been a part of her story. I am not trying to add shine to my life by buffing a coffin I have no right to touch, or cast my shadow on a scene to which I have no invitation. But I want to know why I prayed and what that prayer meant, if anything.
Did I feel compelled by a sense, in the collective pool of soul-consciousness that we all share, that she was passing? Was I just meant to pray that prayer at that time because someone had to, or was it all coincidence? People pray all the time. Sick people die. These things, as we are told again and again with sickening regularity, happen.
And if this was an answer to prayer, am I supposed to be pleased? Relieved? Am I a healer now? Is God, in my imagining, a genie from a moralistic fable, teaching children to be specific in what they ask for? Honestly, I don’t know what I was asking for. I don’t know why that moment held more faith for me than I have felt in years. I hope to Jesus that I wasn’t praying He would end a human being’s life.
I am sorry for her suffering and that she is gone. I am sorry for those who loved her who are hurting. I have no useful things to say to them.
If I wanted to tie this in a bow, I could say that God answers our prayers but not always in the ways we imagine. Or that He hears our hearts when our lips are too scared to speak what we feel. I could thank You, Lord, for signalling to me that You are real and active and that, even in the horror of this suffering life, You choose to speak to the unworthy. For ending her suffering. Or that I should be better at caring. That there is hope even in death. That God is good.
Or I could praise God from whom all blessings flow: the problems and frustrations and rejections of life that are not suffering and Gethsemane fear. The boredom and petty selfishness that is possible in a life that hasn’t had a scalpel taken to it, or a nail, a saw. Praise Him, we creatures here below for the pleasures and joys of the ordinary. The absence of the pain we were born for. Is this what I’m supposed to learn (as if everything in this damaged world is a lesson for me)? There but for the grace of God, in all of His enormity, go I? Is that the best I can do?
I am tired of my own voice and I’m not even speaking.
He is good. He is so good. I don’t understand him.
He is merciful. Kind. Appalling. Strange.
He has been so good to me.
Who am I to judge Him?
This is lovely! And so honest. Thanks
Thanks Jonty.