c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) She survived her childhood, but now, as an adult, she struggles to survive the incest that ruled her youth.

She prayed hard, says a friend, but God evidently “didn’t hear her,” because the abuse kept happening. Where was God? Years later, the question still nags.

Now she is studying yet another of those books which proclaim God as in control of all things, as one who answers all prayer, as one who leads all faithful people to abundance. Now, in addition to memories of incest, she must face the cruel implication that God was in control of those nighttime visits, that God chose to ignore her cries, that she must have been insufficiently faithful.

Do her fellow book-readers have any idea how their quest for a self-justifying prosperity gospel leads inexorably to a demonic God?

I remember trying to pastor a group of incest survivors. It was so difficult to imagine life across that divide, so difficult to sit within their pain as they raged against adults who betrayed trust, so difficult to stay in the circle as they sorted through popular religion’s blithe assertion of a God who plans and controls. What sort of God would have a “plan” that required a child’s abuse?

The image of God as planner, controller and dispenser of prayer-earned abundance is a pleasing conceit for the healthy and prosperous. It is pleasing to think of their good fortune as divine favor. But what about the rest of humanity? Other than asking them to leave, what do the abundance-seekers have to say to the unfortunate, the abused, the weak, the lost, the vast majority who cannot wake up each morning thanking God for a full larder?

“Winners pray harder” _ is that Godly counsel? “Cooperate with God to make abundance happen” _ does that do anything more than sell books?

My friend asks how to help her friend. The first answer, of course, is to love her, to stay beside her, to listen to her as deeply as possible. Religion tends to have a short attention span for pain. Don’t be like that.

She can also say this: Yes, God did hear her, and God wept for her. She couldn’t hear the sound of God’s weeping then, but can she hear it now? For the truth about God seems to be that God suffers as much as we do from his fundamental decision to allow his creation to be free.

I don’t say such things lightly. Another friend asked recently, “If God isn’t in control, then what is God?” Many people have built their faith around God as planner and controller. To protect their house-of-cards faith, they don’t shrink from cruel assurances _ “God must have wanted her more than you did” _ that blame victims for their pain.

Jesus said: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” The good shepherd doesn’t cause the wolf to attack, or compel the “hired hand” to be lazy and inattentive, or see the attack coming and yet allow it to happen in order to teach some spiritual lesson. Evil does its own work.

God is a binder of wounds. God weeps over the fallen, as Jesus wept over Jerusalem. God suffers with creation, as Jesus suffered when Lazarus died. God points the way to good pasture, but whether we err and stray is up to us. God established a good creation, but whether we farm it wisely and share its fruits with others is up to us. If the few prosper while the many starve, that isn’t a divine plan at work, but “man’s inhumanity to man.”

It isn’t “God’s will” which sets parent against child, or race against race, or predators against the weak, or the selfish against everyone. It is God’s will to bear the suffering of God’s people, to shine light into the darkness, and when the darkness fights back, to lay down his life on the cross.

We don’t protect God by assigning to God a sovereignty over all events. We protect only ourselves and that immature faith which sees oneself as the center and cause of all things, even abuse.

DEA END EHRICH