“I was the accuser, and God the accused. My
eyes were open and I was alone- terribly alone in a world without God and
without man. Without love or mercy. I have ceased to be anything but ashes. Yet
I felt myself to be stronger than the Almighty, to whom my life had been tied
for so long.”
~Elie Wiesel
Although my suffering, if I may be so bald as
to call it that, cannot compare to that of Wiesel, a man who lived through
Hitler’s Jewish concentration camps, I claim his words for my own for I too was
once the accuser and God the accused.
I have said, on several occasions, that God
does not exist. For how could He, when there is such pain and suffering in this
world? Sure, He is not the one who causes the pain but surely He is mighty
enough to hear the cries and moans and prayers of those in pain and the agonizing
sound of a heart breaking- for it is seldom that a heart in excruciating pain
can tear apart silently. Surely, I have thought, a God who is alive would hear
the millions of prayers from a family in hurt praying for a miracle. Surely, a
God who exists would not let a man who has done nothing but work hard all his
life and followed Him completely die. Yes, everyone must die! But a God-fearing
man surely deserves no less than an honorable death! Not a death which takes
years, not one that takes away a man’s most precious memories one by one,
surely not a death that reduces him to a child-like state!
But if such a man who serves God, is
unfortunate enough to come upon such debilitating circumstances as is dementia then
surely a God who is alive would hear the prayers prayed over the years, getting
more desperate, and surely this God would see the efforts of a heartbroken
family for their head to be healed. So, surely, if this thing that calls
Himself God sees and hears all this He need only to raise His mighty hand and
correct the situation. If, as the scriptures say, God is the same yesterday,
today and forever then surely He could have healed Alzheimer’s as easily as he
healed a leper. After the unanswered prayers and after the funeral, I, indeed,
was the accuser, and God the accused.
God does not exist, yet, I continue to spell
His name with a capital letter. God does not exist and yet I am comforted by
the knowledge of a healthy and whole honorable man in heaven who perhaps (in
my child-like yearnings) looks out for me from his vantage point up there. GOD
DOES NOT EXIST and yet I feel ashamed at the very thought of myself trying to
fool myself into believing something I know is not true. When I am scared I run
to Him, and when I have nightmares I use His name as some sort of invincible weapon
against evil. I see Him in the numerous blessings that encompass me.
Much of my very short and somewhat uneventful
life I have felt alone. I have always been ‘different’ (a term which many
people would use on themselves). I have felt the all time low of presumed abandonment
from a God who refused to answer my prayers so therefore who ceased to exist,
and from man because no man could do the work of God. I have often said that I
cannot hear God or see Him and because I had (and often still do) shut the door
on Him and created a painfully carnal void between me and my creator, I could
definitely not feel him. Yet, well, He-who-does-not-exist was and is always
there. “Alone, yet not alone” as in the words of Joni Eareckson Tada.
I am ashamed to admit that I once thought to
myself and even, between the bitter tears of a child who did not get what she
wanted, uttered the words ‘maybe it would be better if he just died.’ Because I
thought that that would ease incomprehensible pain and suffering, and because “I
spoke like a child, I thought like a child, and I reasoned like a child”. But
death has a way of aiding in one’s growing process and so I would like to think
that I have since “put childish ways behind me” because I have since learned
that the pain of absence in no lesser than the pain of suffering. Pain is pain
just as a sin is a sin. But perhaps this God spoke a bit through my childish
words because, I am happy to say that I have since learned that a child of God does
not die away FROM health and happiness but rather dies INTO health and eternal
happiness - life that cannot even begin to compare to what our carnal minds can
fathom.
I have been broken, as has my family and many
people in this world. I was broken and then I tried to break myself to the
point of numbness but that was impossible because my foundations were built on
a God who supposedly did not exist. Still, I screamed and struggled and drove
myself away from Him. I often said that I couldn't hear God speak to me and so
therefore He did not exist, all the while not knowing that the voice was not
from the eternal but from the internal. Whose voice showed me the way back to
the path when I had wandered too far in the darkness, the darkness of sin, of
depression, of loneliness, of anger and confusion? Whose voice gets me out of
bed every morning and makes me want to try to be the best that I can be? Whose
voice tells me that I can? Whose voice reminds me that I am loved and blessed
with a God-sent family? Whose voice tells me I am beautiful? It’s not the voice of the world and it’s
certainly not my own voice.
I am the accuser and God the accused. There are
plenty of questions I still need answers to but I understand that I may not get
these answers because I would not even begin to comprehend them in this
lifetime. Because of my earthly mind I will feel bitter about my lack of
understanding and yes I will play the role of the accuser yet now, unlike
Wiesel who lost his faith in God completely because of what he had been
through, I understand that I will never be mightier than the ALmighty. I know I
am weak, but “blessed are the weak for theirs is the Kingdom of God” and my
life will be tied to Him-Who-Exists for eternity.
Wiesel, on seeing a small boy being hanged in
the Nazi concentration camp...
“Where is God now?”
“Where is He? Here he is- He is hanging here
on this gallows...”
Indeed.
