A Love Supreme

Ed. Note: This is the third installment in a three-part series. The first, “The Small Origins of Big Things,” appeared in our October 2024 issue, and the second, “History Never Happened,” in December.

If God is God He is not good,
If God is good he is not God;
Take the even, take the odd…

­— Archibald MacLeish, “J.B.”

Twenty twenty-four was the year I hated God. My resentment had been building for some time as I watched sexual abuse and the transplantation of cheap politics for deep theology eat away at the Catholic Church. Even earlier, when I was in high school, I had read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and could find no answer to the blasphemous charges the fictional inquisitor had leveled against Christ. Like him, I wanted answers. Why would God allow evil to exist in the Church? Why should human beings suffer in the world God had made? These unanswered questions resurged with a vengeance, and on New Year’s Day 2024 the dam broke.

That afternoon, television screens and smartphones in Japan lit up with warnings of a massive earthquake under the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture, on the side of the Japanese island of Honshu that faces the continent of Asia. The next few days were filled with images I will never forget. Houses buckled in the violent shaking — top floors pancaked onto bottom floors, crushing people who had been enjoying time with their families. Fire swept through a market town, destroying lives and livelihoods. A tsunami of black, swollen sea swallowed up a line of coast. Mountainsides broke loose and slid into valleys, taking homes and helpless people with them in a cascade of boulders and trees. A woman kneeling on the ground outside a ruined dwelling took off her jacket and placed it over the cold, dead body of her daughter, who had been pulled from the rubble. A man’s eyes smarted in disbelief during an interview with news crews as he realized his wife of half a century was gone.

A cruel January snow then started to fall on the rescuers and those left homeless by the natural disaster. Bitter cold mocked the nakedness of the already poor. Some schoolchildren sang a happy song in an unheated gymnasium that had been converted into a makeshift shelter. The people who listened shed tears through their forced smiles. Days stretched into weeks, then months. Many people gave up on Ishikawa and moved elsewhere, leaving the twisted remains of their shattered lives behind.

Eight months later, the rains came. Late summer torrents gorged streams, turning them into violent rapids. Homes broken in the January earthquake were swept away and reduced to driftwood, bobbing toys for the sea. Temporary shelters for earthquake victims were flooded. Those who had salvaged what little they could from their ravaged homes — photographs of loved ones, blankets that had once warmed children whom the earthquake killed — lost even that in a sopping September mud. The news crews returned; people again put on brave faces and smiled through their tears. “Our hearts are close to breaking,” some said. There is only so much human beings can take. A father tried to remain stoic during a TV interview as a search continued for his middle-school-aged daughter who was last heard from as floodwaters rose around her room. Her body was found weeks later, tangled in uprooted trees. Nobody had asked for such misery. Surely, nobody deserved it.

For God so loved the world, I thought, with dark irony. The cruelty, the petty hatefulness, was disgusting. In my heart, I hated God. What kind of a sadistic monster does such a thing? An earthquake, a snowfall, and then a flood — who made the universe, I wondered, and why wasn’t He doing anything to help us?

I watched the people of Noto suffer and felt a guilty gratitude for the house I have, the clothes I wear, and the food I eat. But I could not put out of my mind the war I had declared on a vengeful, vindictive, tyrannical Creator. I began to question what history could mean in light of the idiotic chastisement we all face simply by dint of existing. I changed the channel and saw news of battles and conquests, schemes for domination, ambitions to high office, the cynical courting of money and fame, and the hope — almost always in vain — that one would be remembered well by future historians. What useless striving, I mused.

Noto made plain to me that what we imagine as the story of our lives does not match the reality of the universe in which we live. Our history books mean nothing. The ground or the ocean kills us at random. The sky does, too. Microbes carry away the rest. Whatever narrative we build around our little scramblings on the surface of this planet is, at best, a distraction from a harsher truth. God, it seemed to me, was forever tripping us up, waiting to strike when it would hurt us most. Not benevolent, not even indifferent — it was clear to me for an alienated season that whoever had made our cosmos hated what He had created and took perverse delight in torturing us, perhaps because we stood as reminders of the failure of a once-great plan.

History comes to nothing, I reflected, because the universe is poorly designed and plagued by acts of divine terrorism. Woven through the big-bones framing of what we call history are countless acts of sabotage, hour by hour, moment by moment, poking holes in our rice-paper-frail human hopes. We strive, some of us, for historical greatness as a way to usurp God’s sovereignty. To the extent that we forget our place as contingent beings while doing so, it is easy to see why God would thwart the designs of the hubristic and the proud. That Napoleon and Croesus were brought low is only reasonable, considering the distance between the Maker and the pretenders. But most of us strive not for worldly glory or even recognition, but for simple happiness, and we are undone by a God who seems to revel in our undoing. God reclaims history through the suffering of the wicked. But does He also reclaim human time by picking apart all we would do, great or small, in human eyes?

So, I grumbled through a year, casting blame toward Heaven for things big and small. If only I could be an atheist, I thought more than once, then I might have at least the comfort of nothingness, which would be preferable to the immediacy of what felt like a tailored and useless pain.

But then I heard philosopher William Lane Craig say something in a recent interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn that was like a lifeline as I was virtually drowning in my resentment. “God is timeless without creation,” Craig said, “and He is temporal since the moment of creation.” Craig argues that it would be impossible for God to “change His mind” and annihilate the world He had created, because once a world had existed in time, it always would have existed in time. That is to say, no world can be annihilated completely, because the past cannot be erased from God’s knowing. What “was” always has been, since the fateful moment God set time in motion. “Once time comes into being, that fact is always a temporal fact,” Craig continued, “even if God annihilates everything and goes back into a state of changelessness.”

My recriminations against a universe seemingly programmed to destroy us turned to dust as I heard Craig speak. “It is part of the condescension of God,” he said, “that God, out of His love for us and His desire to relate to us, would quit this state of eternal, timeless perfection that He enjoyed, and enter into, take on, our temporal mode of existence in order to sustain relationships with us.” In other words, God did not have to create us, but once He did, He could never undo what He had done. Existence is gratuitous, but only for creatures. For God, existence apart from Himself is a sacrificial act. God does not torment us. Rather, we, in our nothingness, in our accusations, torment God.

Craig’s words turned my sour mind turtle. I had had it all wrong. If God created the universe ex nihilo, then He must be omnipotent. It follows that He is omniscient (for any limits on knowing would obviate the ability to move nothing to something, a move that presupposes total existence and, therefore, total awareness). This means God knew when He spun our world into being that it would be an irreversible act. He also knew that the creature He had made in His image, man, would bring death — an unthinkable upending of God’s total existence — into the cosmos. The Second Person of the Trinity knew from all eternity that death on a cross was an ineluctable sacrifice. God did all this anyway.

The scenes from Noto ran back through my mind, only now as commentaries on the unfathomable love of a God who chose His own death so that we might take part — through no merit of our own — in His pure act of being. Time — human time, the time in which earthquakes and tsunamis rage — is not some river flowing parallel to God, some incidental thing from which God can remain aloof. It is the river in which God commits shinju, lover’s suicide, with us, His beloved. In creating the universe, God knew the cost. He would have to give up plenary power to be spat on and crowned with thorns in order to redeem us. The all-seeing God blinded Himself on a Friday afternoon and cried out in anguish at a universe — His universe — that seemed to have forsaken Him. I would not crawl into a dollhouse to die for the dolls — and there is infinitely more dissimilarity between God and us than between me and figurines. Even so, God died so we could have His life as our own.

God’s life as our own is the mystery at the heart of human suffering. Where we and God meet is on the most unknowable, and yet most intimate, of grounds. German-Polish theologian Erich Przywara spoke, on Aristotelian lines, of the analogia entis, analogical being. God and man do not have the same kind of being in one sense, Przywara argued. Our being is contingent; God’s is not. We were created; God simply is. But in another sense, our being and God’s can be compared. Przywara harkens back to the words of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) to help explain this finest of distinctions, between our being completely unlike God while also being His handiwork, sustained by Him in an act of love. “One cannot note any similarity between creator and creature, however great,” the Council Fathers taught, and Przywara reiterates, “without being compelled to observe an ever greater dissimilarity between them.” And yet, here we are, in no way like God but loved into existence by Him.

There are echoes in Przywara of St. Augustine’s views on the relationship between God and man. For Augustine, this relationship manifests in a special way in the subject of time. In Book XI of his Confessions, Augustine famously meditates on the nature of time in light of God’s eternity, writing, “In your Word all is uttered at one and the same time, yet eternally.” We are strung out along a long stretch of life, and in this life we speak in distant, clumsy imitations of the Logos at the beginning of time. But sometimes that human language can boom forth the majesty of the One who created us. In human language set to music — the metered approximation of time set free and cleaved back to God — the Word might sound like John Coltrane’s voice emerging from a saxophone scattering, a godly tone praying against a sonic backdrop of chaos forming into the universe’s dawn: “A love supreme, a love supreme.” The force of this refrain brought me to tears when I heard it again after a long time. The great and good jazz musician softened my heart so I could receive Craig’s wise words in God’s good time. The words are the Word, and the Word the curved-in, out-opening form of the man whom God made at the price of His having to die with him. Coltrane embodies the analogia entis in his mystical vision of love breaking through the darkness. It is just as Coltrane sang and played, and Craig argued, and Augustine said: “What is that light whose gentle beams now and again strike through to my heart, causing me to shudder in awe yet firing me with their warmth? I shudder to feel how different I am from it: yet in so far as I am like it, I am aglow with its fire.”

Przywara, meditator on the loving God, knew his Augustine well. In his essay “St. Augustine and the Modern World” (1930), Przywara writes of the gentle North African bishop and his abiding love for the God who made the world and the men in it. With Augustine, Przywara writes that “there is no anxious search for assurance” of salvation. “On the contrary, he lies quietly down to rest in the night.” That we exist is proof enough of God’s love for us. Suffering is God’s gift to mankind, a reminder that we are bought with a price and redeemed with a Passion. To rest quietly in the night, to abide in the contours of the world, the very being of which is Braille telling of the love of the Maker — isn’t this what we all must do? It is what I was unable to do in 2024 as I wrestled with a false image of a hateful God. I wanted the universe to be perfected, to be wrung free of evil and pain. But to ask for this is to ask God to be something other than love. For only a loving God would create a world in the first place. And a created world, wherein creatures are free to love as God loves, is necessarily an imperfect world. It could be no other. My wish for an earthly paradise was a wish against the deepest desires of God, who gave me life at the cost of His own. I cannot have existence and perfection together, not yet, because the one is the bride-price of the other, and God wants nothing more than to cleave to His bride.

This, I think, is the fullness of the analogia entis. It is not just that we are pale reflections of the Godhead, but that the Godhead dethrones Himself and casts His lot with us here below. It is an act of abandon. Dissimilarity in similarity is one thing, but in the unknowable equation by which God translates His being into ours there is, at the same time, a warm familiarity and an infinite regress. We sense that God is with us, but we do not know how. Shared pain, however, is something different. The analogia entis is where the rubber meets the road. Shared pain is not how God is like us but how He is us, in our deepest, most broken inner being. It is not His being but His embrace, His caress. God’s glory is His alone; our heartbreak, by contrast, is where He takes up His home in us, to love in time what He loved into time, out of nothingness. Heartbreak is what God chose to suffer so that we might be called into existence. The universe, this odd and deserted campground, was born doomed, because God doomed Himself by making it. In this way, God is closest to us in our suffering, in our darkness, in the stupidity of our pain. When we fall to the ground weeping, God is the heaving of our breast. When we are empty and gasping, God is there; when we feel farthest away from His glory, He is with us the most.

In Noto that terrible New Year’s Day of 2024, God was not aloof as the buildings disintegrated and the people inside them were crushed by roof beams or impaled by broken glass. God was the very contours of their suffering. Our pain is His and was from the beginning. The world never had to be created; we never had to be born. There could just as easily have been nothing as something. Why should an end have a beginning? Why should a hawk have a sky? We brought death into the world through sin. But God died with us, in us, and through us, clear through to the morning of the third day, when the price of the universe — the hypostatic union of contingent and eternal — was paid in full.

There is no end of things until they end in God, when we who were born to suffer are born again to live with Him forever. “O Lord, my Hope,” Augustine wrote, “allow me to explore further. Do not let me grow confused and lose track of my purpose.”

“Pain and suffering have come into your life, but remember pain, sorrow, suffering are but the kiss of Jesus — a sign that you have come so close to Him that He can kiss you.” ― St. Teresa of Calcutta

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