Searching for God # 54

 On this Monday in Advent, the church’s season of preparation for the birth of a baby in a manger, in Bethlehem, the world faces three horrific tragedies on top of the military, and political, economic and environmental conflicts around the globe.

At Brown University in Providence Rhode Island, on Bondi Beach in Sydney Australia and in Brentwood California, murder, assassination, and gun violence proliferates the television screens.

‘Where is God?’ One might  be prompted to ask in a kind of desperate, despairing, dispirited, and despondent frame of mind. In some way, for those millions in various degrees of horror the world might very well be asking in  Aramaic, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

From Psalm 22:1, and also from Matthew 27:46 and Mar 15:34, the phrase is renowned for expressing anguish, whether from the psalmist or from the gospels, attributed to Jesus immediately prior to the Crucifixion. And in many ways, ‘we are all one’ in this cry today, although the actual motives of the various ‘agents of death’ may and likely do range from antisemitism to addictions and remain under investigation.

The news will, and already are targeting the many potential political acts to curtail gun violence, like background checks, red flag laws, laws to enable gun manufacturers to be held liable for mass shootings….etc. etc. And the hatred and the bigotry and the violence will continue.

And while we are all one in condemning the violence, the bloodshed and the shame and fear that we all share, somehow we are all one, as Steve Miller, coach of the Golden State Warriors, puts it, in that we do not want to think about such acts because they are so heinous, and yet we must think about it, we must confront it.

And while the west, and particularly the United States regularly champions its Christian religiosity, it may well be that the dark side of each of us is so repressed, suppressed, denied, avoided and buried in our unconscious, a dynamic we have to acknowledge we all share, like our love of war itself, that the buried demonic voice may well be coming out to ‘bite us in our own butts’.

How could we possible imagine, while sitting in thousands of church pews at this time of year, singing carols, planning creches, Sunday School pageants, all of them celebrating the baby’s birth, close our eyes, not only to the slaughter we see in Gaza, in Ukraine, in the Sudan, and elsewhere? How could we turn a deaf ear and a blind eye and the cold heart to the millions of literally abandoned men, women and children facing food deprivation, shelter insecurity, job insecurity, and even political and military and disease displacement? And, in our silence and complicity and denial not share in the depth of their cry, ‘My God, My God  why have you abandoned me?

The headline cries of shame and blame and weeping and gnashing of teeth, while dramatic and appropriate for ratings, advertising revenue and corporate stability, are little more than another layer of dramatic, melodramatic and histrionic washing our hands of the problem of our shared inhumanity to other humans, all of them just like us….trying in our own unique ways, with whatever resources might be at hand, to eke out a living, to strive to fulfil a dream, to be the best parent or child for each other, to be the most kind and supportive friend….all the while becoming increasingly aware of the fragility of the threat of life….not only for the aging, or the seriously ill, or the starving, or the displaced and homeless…but in general.

Technical bureaucratic, legal, forensic, and even psychological profiling, while perhaps they all have a role, are only band-aids to a cancer of insecurity, fear, blaming, judging and shaming in which we are all so intimately and deceptively indoctrinated that we have lost sight of our innocence. Camouflaged by our ‘superiority’ (How could anyone do such a thing?) that separates each of us from such acts of hatred, bigotry, prejudice, and revenge, we tend to live in a la la land of our own making in our own heads.

Perhaps we might consider reversing the biblical cry, from My God, My God why have you forsaken me? To something more relevant, ‘My God, My God, why have I forsaken you?’

Trumpeting and triumphing in the hymns of love, compassion, empathy, and forgiveness, at this Advent holy season, with new birth as the central image of the season, Christians everywhere might want to reflect on the violence we have each, whether directly or indirectly, whether consciously and deliberately or unconsciously and insensitively, imposed abusively on others. I write this as a father who ‘abandoned’ his daughters, in and by separating from and then divorcing their mother. And my own implication in the archetypal stories of abandonment is inescapable. Of course, I am ashamed of my act of  abandonment. Of course, I despair of my shame and my own choices continue to activate my pulse in an endless search, not so much for redemption as for insight, maturity, and being more honest with myself.

When the shooting slaughter occurred at Columbine High in Littleton Colorado, I served as vicar in a rural mission in that state, and held a service of mourning that evening with lighted candles on the altar for all of the victims, including the shooters. It was a silent, unequivocal, somewhat risky non-violent resistance to the violence of bullying and scapegoating that haunts the corridors of schools, as well as the ethereal streams and threads of the internet. Many victims of such bullying have taken their own lives, without the kind of headlines today’s stories have garnered. And yet those grieving families are as lost, desperate, despairing and despondent as the families of the victims of the many deaths this weekend, the first weekend of Hanakkuh on the Jewish calendar.

Abrahamic religions, Jewish, Muslim and Christian, have many common attributes, while the headlines scream hate and bigotry between various segments of those faiths. The Middle East is a hotbed of fear and violence that seems to respond neither to negotiation nor missiles nor entreaties from holy personages like the various Popes. If Muslims are continuing to pray in preparation for Ramadan in February, 2026 and Jews are celebrating Hanakkuh, a re-dedication of the temple, after they drove the Greeks off in the second century, and Christians are commemorating the birth of Jesus, the incarnation where God became human bringing hope to the world…is it not a moment for al three to pause, to reflect and to begin anew a different dialogue from all of those tried before?

Perhaps, remembering the dead body of the young boy on the beach as a catalyst to awaken the world to the plight of refugees streaming from North Africa into Europe, could this day of death, depravity, despondency and hopelessness become a turning point in the minds, hearts, souls and spirits of all adherents in the Abrahamic faiths, to declare common cause of non-violently confronting illegitimate evil with common force as a purposeful, meaningful and sustainable impulse to enact, to embody and to incarnate the faiths we all protest to uphold?

It is not God, nor G-d nor Allah who has abandoned us! And our flailing away in any celebrations while remaining ‘innocent’ and ‘ignorant’ of our shared complicity in evil only debases all of the many charitable, loving, compassionate and empathic acts of kindness that will be shared this season. Our shared an acknowledged hypocrisy and complicity need not be our legacy to our deity or to our families or to our faiths, or to humanity.