Despair Everywhere

My mother just shared with me that recently on a number of occasions she has found my father kneeling at his bedside in the middle of the night. She assumes he is praying but I have never even heard my father say the word "pray" or the word "God" for that matter. Only half jokingly he used to say to us "God doesn't bother me and I don't bother God". This was to relay a message to his four children that he was not in need of God to survive, to make it through the day or his life. Then he found himself later in life in an ugly lawsuit that aged him, that drained him and made him consider God. He began to attend church for a couple of years and I know that it gave him great comfort. His life brought him face to face with despair and he reached for God's hand.

I don't think this is uncommon. I think for many, if not most, of us we go along about our business too busy to consider God, our lives, our own despair until one day it comes knocking so hard on our door that we have to answer. I too am guilty of seeking God not in a moment of great joy or celebration but during a time when I doubted Love and any reason for being. I wanted order to the chaos I was spiritually experiencing. As I was not raised in a church I began my search for some moral absolutes by reading various religious texts. I know of, in some small sense, the despair that author Chris Hedges discusses in his chapter Culture of Despair, that leads people to Christian fundamentalism. The weight of our suffering and unanswered "Whys?" is too much to bear alone.

If our fear and isolation drive us toward God and perhaps even to religious utopianism there is danger, as Hedges points out, of abolition of critical thinking distinct of an open society. Totalitarianism rises from the mountains of despair experienced by the impoverished and disconnected. Fundamentalism often represents destruction of "the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to advocate for change and accept that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable." In our search for God and for finding comfort for our despair we must celebrate life and difference and not find strength in our fears or remain embedded in our suffering by building walls around our hearts and communities.
Amen.