What God Does

 It's Easter Monday, and I'm suffering from whiplash. In a single week, I've walked with Jesus through palm-branch praise, sharp-thorn scourging, crucifixion, and finally an empty-tomb triumph promising glory. I love ritual, and have spent many hours in church reflecting on this story. Yet sometimes, it's all too much—the speed, the pace, the grueling Ordeal. Then, suddenly, a celebration with pastel colors and chocolate eggs.

Call me a downer, but as a therapist, I worry about the optics. About misunderstandings. Like Jesus carrying his cross, real-life troubles weigh heavy and rub people raw. In ordinary lives, challenges take years to emerge and unfold. I feel protective of people caught in the web of day-to-day turmoils. Marital turmoil can last for years. Illnesses drag on and down. Work failures stop us cold, as do lives stalled by illness, addiction, depression, and betrayals. Sometimes we hang in numbly, or we look for the push-button fix, whatever gets us through. Ordeals like these don't pass in three days. Typically, life serves up agonies where worry reigns, and nothing seems to change. It's the closed-in tomb-time of Holy Saturday. And, who hasn't lived through stretches of life's long, uncertain middles that wear us down and blur any sense of life's purpose and meaning?

Counseling sessions can be spaces to hold confusion and sort through the jumbled details of daily life. Every therapist has a therapist; like my clients, I've learned that talking issues through builds the capacity to shift, move through confusion, bear uncertainty, and not be crushed. In time, limiting situations can reveal that we're larger than what confines us. Unexpected answers can surface in the unknowable that help us to shift and change for the better. 

Such moments of clarity can arrive unexpectedly—as I discovered during a recent visit to a near-and-dear friend this Lent. She is a woman who, while raised as a traditional Catholic, no longer practices any particular religion. Whatever her current beliefs, I know her well as a deeply spiritual person.

Before I begin, I add caution. The telling of any story differs each time it is told: the weather and the time of day, thoughts before the telling, what the speaker and listener think when they look up at the stars or down the street, and how they feel when they wake up that particular morning. Stories can change because of what someone's had to drink or eat, whether they dream or have anything to hope for. Most especially, stories change when told by someone other than the one to whom the action happened. More than anything, I'm saying I wish I could cut and paste her telling of this story to understand what made it so special.

As the story goes, my friend was watching a news report that flashed a variety of images in rapid succession. One scene showed a mother holding onto an infant that had just been killed in the midst of war - too graphic to describe. But I wish you could hear the rise and fall of my friend's voice when she tells this part. As I listened, I suffered her long pauses, felt the care she took in describing the look in the mother's eyes as she held onto her mercilessly broken child.

The mother's sadness hit her in the gut. She shut off the program, fell into silence, and cried. Seconds after, questions followed. "How? she wondered.  How can we accept that any human being should have to go through anything this painful? Where are you, God, in this? How can suffering of this magnitude ever be allowed to happen? Why is it that people can be so cruel?"

Amid these questions, she heard the answer as a great surprise.

"I was weeping before you were.”

When telling the story, my friend emphasizes that she had not been in any conversation or prayer with God beforehand. She also describes the experience as a moment of profound, unexpected grace; a time of deep personal connection.

When I asked about sharing her story and to tell me more, she replied that it shifted her understanding of God: “My angst was met. I was suffering, lost in confusion. I needed something, and God showed up. I got a glimpse of the mystery that God is in me, and I am in God, and we are somehow one. I've moved away from the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing God. Now I feel like I've met the God who is also fully human; the fellow weeper."

Jesus, the fellow weeper. 

Just a week ago, on Palm Sunday, Jesus was in tears over Jerusalem. The way all of us are at times. Don't we all have our stories? Then, in yesterday's sermon, I heard the priest remind us that Easter is all about the possibility of new life, but not easily or without cost.

A mother's heartbreak opened my friend to the mystery of loving connection and ongoing presence. Maybe Easter's deepest truth is not that suffering vanishes, but that, inexplicably, strongly, lovingly, we are accompanied within it. We are not alone. Resurrection, I heard it again, transformation, that is what God does.”