August 1, 2024 – Marisa Guerin, PhD
With the passage of years, I become increasingly aware of “the God I don’t believe in” as well as “the God I faithfully hope in.”
My experience is probably similar to others. I was born into a faith tradition and as I found myself growing into adulthood, some of the images and ideas that were meaningful to me as a younger person fell away and different perspectives on my faith emerged. One of these evolving ideas is that God has a plan for my life. I believe this, but not the way I used to think about it.
I hope to express my thinking on this idea with gentleness and sincerity, because many others who also believe in God will see it differently, and I don’t intend to be challenging or dismissing in any way. What I feel moved to do is to share how my own life journey has led me to a different way of seeing this important element of my faith, along with my exposure to reading, mentors, the spirituality of St. Therese of Lisieux, and the attention I pay to the world I live in.
The change in my belief is this: I no longer think that the mystery we know as God has made specific plans for each of us about the life experiences, sufferings, and joys that we experience. That seems to not fit my picture of God. Why should God’s plan for me involve safety, access to resources, loving family and life as a privileged person in a wealthy country? And why should God’s plan for another woman involve poverty, abuse, the bombings of war or the unimaginable grief of a child killed? Not my idea of a loving God.
I also no longer believe that God decides moment-to-moment whether to intervene in what is going on in life. Why would God perform a miracle for one person and not for another? Of course, God’s ways are mysterious to us, I believe that. What I don’t believe is that God desires any of us to suffer gratuitous pain, or that God listens to the pleas of some and ignores the pleas of others. When healing happens, I am grateful. If it doesn’t, I do my best to bear what is real.
What I don’t believe any more is that God, for some reason, decided that some of us should have lives of sorrow, tragedy, or pain, and that others of us should have lives of blessing and abundance. I can’t believe in a God who inflicts pain like that, especially on the innocent. What I can believe in is a God who grieves with us when we are in pain, whose spirit within us compels us towards healing the world.
I believe that God’s plan for all of God’s creatures, as Jesus preached and demonstrated, is that we might come to live in love, harmony, peace and mutual care, both in this world and the next. So, I do believe God has plans for us and for me, and I do believe that God is always and at all times sustaining us in life, breathing God’s Spirit into our hearts and minds and world, accompanying us intimately in our sufferings and our joys.
Somewhere in the notions I am leaving behind is the idea of God as a parent who punishes God’s children for their own good. I don’t think so. Of course, God wishes us to love others and do justice and avoid evil. But I don’t believe that God punishes us for our failures – normal reality often does that. Instead, God is always ready to forgive, marrying love to justice. (Psalm 85: Kindness and truth shall meet, justice and peace shall kiss.)
The root of the idea that God punishes us, or plans for us to suffer, seems to come from the Middle Ages notion that God must be appeased via blood sacrifice for the betrayal of Adam, and that the death of Jesus, God’s Son, was required by God to redeem the sin of the human race. Over time, that understanding has changed, although many religious leaders still preach this earlier concept of atonement.
The changed understanding is something like the following: when Jesus preached and demonstrated the radical love, nonviolence, justice, and care for the marginal and vulnerable that are the hallmarks of God’s will for us, this was threatening to the powers that be. Jesus was executed, by humans. Neither he, nor the God he knew as “Abba,” desired that death but he accepted it, bore the injustice and horror of it, without hatred for those who executed him, giving his life freely and with forgiving love. His loving God accompanied him throughout it all, and ensured that death will never have the last word by raising Jesus from the dead. Jesus’ death and resurrection were redemptive, not because God required blood ransom, but because Jesus entrusted his life freely to God, who never abandoned him even when powerful forces tried to extinguish him.
I notice in that story that God didn’t intervene to stop the crucifixion of God’s dearly beloved. And God doesn’t intervene to stop the tragedies and diseases and violence that take loved ones from us – whether that comes from human sin, like the Holocaust or war or gang violence, or whether it happens because biological life itself is fragile and our bodies fail in the face of disease, aging, or natural disasters.
My current understanding of God is that God is loving and always present to me, sending the Spirit of love and grace in abundance. I still pray for all the needs that I and others have – I pray for the health of friends and family, and I pray for the end to violence and injustice. But I no longer pray in order to convince God to do something specific, even if it is something I very much want.
I pray instead in hope and in trust.
I pray in hope, that the decisions and actions of people, including myself, will spin the world in a more peaceful and unified direction; hope that all of us will respond to the always-present, creative, loving energy of the Holy Spirit. God invites us to collaborate in the creation of the better world. Prayer doesn’t let me or others off the hook. We have the freedom to choose.
I pray in trust, that even if disease and natural disasters crash in on our lives, all life and death is held in the larger Providence of God who will accompany those I care about in every moment. Trust that God will sustain me and help me to be a loving person now, in the only moment I have, no matter whether it is a moment of celebration or a moment of grief. I think that prayer changes me, not God.
I truly recognize that it is a comfort and an anchor of faith for many who believe that whatever has happened or will happen is precisely the will of God, God’s plan for us. Faith in God’s Providence is important to me, too, in the very big picture. But when we suffer from things that happen because humans are violent or greedy, I think anger and a desire to heal the world are just as legitimate as acceptance of the painful reality that we are bearing.
God doesn’t plan for people to kill and oppress and abuse other people. God doesn’t plan for addiction to happen or for poverty to rob families of all hope. What God does do, is allow the creation that God set in motion at the beginning of time to evolve. That means natural death and injury and disease will happen, and it also means that humans have free will – we can make choices that are life-giving, or choices that perpetuate evil, choices in our personal lives, and choices about the values that are embedded in our social systems. Our failures are responsible for so many of the evils in the world, not God's intentions.
In my thinking these days, God’s plan is the same as it has ever been: that we love God and love one another as we love ourselves. God’s promise is to be with us always, until the end of time and beyond. Meanwhile, we are here as family, communities, neighbors, and fellow citizens of the only world we have; it is on us to be channels of love and peace, depending at all times on the grace of God.
Dear reader, I appreciate your willingness to take in what I am trying to express. Faith sharing is subtle, intimate, not your normal discussion topic. I have written this because in my own life this year, I have been to far too many funerals. Perhaps that is how life will continue to be, as I move into my senior years. As I do my best to accompany the grieving it seems important to me to reflect on how I understand the mercy and grace of God, the holy mystery I will never fully grasp.
