God is in whatever happens next    (Sp.)

The following is an excerpt from A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith by Nancy Mairs.

A few years ago, not for the first time, I fell flat on my face. Literally. In my life, multiple sclerosis serves to translate metaphor back into materiality, as I bear ample scars to attest.

This time, purple stained my swollen left eye and jaw; the crowns on my two front teeth, put in place after an earlier fall, chipped; my lips puffed out in a parody of a sexual pout; and inside the lower lip, four sutures held together the raggedly bitten flesh. As the swelling pressed both inward and outward, I floundered in a fog of painkillers, hating them but grateful for the periods of respite they afforded. Just then I also fell flat on my face figuratively, yet another grant application turned down, and no anodyne could dull the stab of despair this sort of rejection always brings. Body and soul united in one long moan.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told, often by strangers as they observe my crippled form, “God never sends us more than we can handle.” I know they mean to comfort me for what they assume, quite wrongly, to be a wretched fate, and so I grit my teeth and smile -- but weakly. I despise pious clichés, not merely because they falsify experience (most of us face, from time to time, more than we can handle) but because they distance and distort the Holy. God doesn’t “send” the events of our lives, for good or ill. What happens, happens.

On rainy days my elderly white cat used to stare out the back door, then turn his green gaze on me and open his pink maw. “Mwrk!” he would say in a voice ridiculously ill-suited to his bulk.

“Don’t look at me,” I told him every time. “I didn’t do it. It’s not my fault.” He never believed me. Why should he? I caused the kitty kibble to materialize in his bowl. With me around, doors opened and closed at his petition.

Winchester was entitled to his magical sense of my powers. His brain was the size of an immature Brussels sprout at best. In infancy, human creatures, though differently endowed, make similar conjectures. All of us go through a stage of belief in the Almighty Parent before whom we are powerless, who dispenses and withholds at will, who knows our every thought and action even when out of view and judges them, often severely. But we can go through it into spiritual adulthood in which we recognize that God, though infinitely mysterious, is no magician, is indeed not an entity at all but rather an eternal unfolding in which all creation -- even Winchester, even I -- have our parts and our responsibilities.

If there’s anything the modern mind can’t bear, it’s the suspicion that no one is in charge. Individuals want to control their own destinies, and they expect assistance in the venture from a variety of social institutions. If a smooth course gets disrupted, someone can always be found to blame: the negligent parent, the inept school teacher, the corrupt cop, the sleazy manufacturer, the greedy lawyer, the power-hungry politician. Most would not lump him in with this unsavory assembly, but in attributing life’s accidents to God, unconsciously they make of God a similarly remote and even inimical Other to whom they invariably refer with the masculine pronoun, just for the assurance that Somebody is in control.

After reading an early draft of this essay, a friend protested: “You explain how our expectations of God, and our tendency to blame God, rest on a false image of God as parent, and often as negligent parent. I find it hard not to blame God. I guess I don’t try not to. I get the impression that I’m not supposed to have expectations of God. Please fill me in here, because I have Great Big Expectations of God, and as usual, God is not measuring up.”

I know just how she feels. But no, I don’t have expectations of God. Maybe I’m just perpetuating my childhood habit of refusing to hope for whatever I wanted for Christmas so as not to endure the inevitable deluge of disappointment when I didn’t get it.

My sense of God has evolved over time, as has God Godself, and I am better at embracing chaos, which has, physicists have discovered, its own weird elegance, and to admit that no Supreme Being stands outside creation taking charge of the events that befall us in the comforting way the vestigial infant in each of us would like to think. God is the whole: the fall, the pain, the healing, the new fall.

We are never left alone to face the tests an Almighty Examiner chooses to set for us. We, like the rest of creation, are in God, of God, and God is unfailingly present as Whatever Happens Next.

National Catholic Reporter, October 5, 2007