APOLOGIES

 

Recently I found myself in a long discussion with a young man who is dealing with a lot of setbacks, illness and disappointments that seem to keep coming at him one after another. He is a deeply religious person who converses, he says, with God a whole lot. I asked him if in the course of his conversations with Jesus he ever complains or gets upset at God for all the bad things that keep happening to him. Like many of us Catholics, he was raised to believe that it's a sin to get angry at God. Ouf! Talk about a surefire way to stifle intimacy in a relationship"! Don't share your deepest emotions with the other! 

He then surprised me, though, with this: " I remember when I was in eighth grade and you told us in a sermon one Sunday about how angry you were at God when your brother died of cancer. When I heard you say that, I said to myself, 'Well if he can be angry at God, I guess it must be okay'." That was several years ago, but he still remembers that homily. 

In the course if our long talk, I introduced him to another aspect of our relationship of intimacy with God, namely, the idea that God apologizes for not being able to reveal to you and me all the mysteries of life due to our limited intellects. I'd like to share with you now a chapter from my book "Faces of Easter: Meeting the Paschal Mystery in the People Around Us" that presents this idea pretty well. I hope you enjoy it. 

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No teenager should have to watch his mother waste away from cancer, I grumble to myself, as I drive down King Boulevard on my way to an evening memorial service for the mother of Daniel one of my students. She has left three children, in fact. As a priest, who is called to offer comfort to people in these situations, I’m horrified by the overwhelming wrongness of it all. As I turn down another dim street, I notice the black circles of skid marks called “donuts,” left by desperate teenagers in stolen cars. Right now, I’m feeling as frustrated and angry as one of those kids.

I learned as a child, one standard response to God’s apparent cruelty in allowing deaths of mothers, earthquakes, suicide bombings and SIDS. The gist of it was: “God knows best; so just suck it up, stop complaining, and deal with it.”

I remember, even then, thinking that this couldn’t be right. (Who came up with that idea, anyway?) Jesus never spoke like this in the Gospels. When he sees the widow’s son being carried out to be buried, does he say to the grief-stricken mother, “Just suck it up, stop complaining, and deal with it?” No, instead, he is moved with compassion; he walks over, stops the pall bearers before they even get to the grave, and revives the boy.

A memory flashes in me: I think of the writer, Georges Bernanos, describing a mother who, while holding her dead child in her arms, offers God a groan of exhausted resignation. Suddenly she hears the voice of God murmur gently into her ear, “Forgive me. One day you will know, you will understand, you will thank me. But right now, what I am looking for from you is your forgiveness. Forgive me”

In my childhood, no one had ever suggested to me that God could -- or even needed to -- apologize. God was, after all, perfect, incapable of making a mistake, and certainly would never need to apologize to any poor suffering sinner, including me.

But, ever since I came across that passage in Bernanos, I always enjoy introducing others, whenever I can, to this kind and gentle God who apologizes, who asks my pardon when I am suffering, and who promises that one day I will understand the suffering and even thank him for it. I’m still discovering more about Bernanos’ God every day and have come to realize that this God who sympathizes with my suffering is the same One who suffered and died for all of us on the cross. Just how he will take the horrors of all our personal Good Fridays, and transform them into the gift of new life, our personal Easter, is still a mystery -- which is why, I suppose, the Lord apologizes.

I turn up Lyons Avenue, and, peering into the descending darkness, I make out the little Baptist church, “Mount Calvary,” just ahead on the left. I pull into a parking space right in front. With a heavy heart I get out of the car; I call on the risen Jesus to stand beside my young student in the throes of his grief tonight and gently whisper to his heart, “Forgive me, Daniel. One day you will know, you will understand, you will thank me. But right now, what I am looking for from you is your forgiveness. Forgive me”

I lock the car, turn and slowly climb the steep steps to Mount Calvary.