Dr Richard Leonard is a 47-year-old Australian Jesuit and Director of the Australian Catholic Film and Broadcasting Office. His book, Where the Hell is God? is a result of his struggle to come to terms with a tragedy that befell his family.
At dawn on the morning of my 25th birthday, I was roused from my bed to be told me that my mother was on the phone. I do not come from a very demonstrative family. We do not call each other at dawn on birthdays, but as soon as I heard Mum’s voice I knew this was not a happy birthday call. ‘Your sister has had a car accident and I have to get to Darwin immediately. I am hoping you might come with me.’
My sister, Tracey, had completed her nursing studies straight after school and within months was in Calcutta nursing at Kalighat Home for the Dying, Mother Teresa’s first foundation. When the Indian Government refused to renew her Visa, because she was a volunteer, she returned to Australia and got a job working with the Sisters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in running a health centre for the Aboriginal people at Port Keats. She was young, full of life and very capable.
The day before my birthday Tracey relieved the local nurse in another outback town, Adelaide River, a small community about one hour south of Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory. What happens next is Tracey’s story, so I will let her tell it from her book, The Full Catastrophe.
‘It is near the end of my time in Adelaide River that I drive over to Port Keats for the weekend. I take Margaret, the wife of the plumber, and her three children with me. We have a wonderful weekend and are just outside Adelaide River on our return journey when the engine gives a cough and dies. Fortunately two vehicles come along shortly after we stop and they offer to give us a tow into town.
We are all hooked up and on our way, but before I realise what’s happening I find myself driving over the tow rope with my car veering off to the left. I grip the steering wheel to cushion the impact of a small tree looming in front of me and the next thing I know, the entire car has rolled over, leaving me unsure whether I’m up or down. I cannot move a muscle and feel as if the entire roof of the car is pressing down on my head. My mouth and brain still work, though, and once I have ascertained the children are fine and Margaret is not badly hurt, I feel a great sense of relief.
Many hours later and with police, ambulance and the nurse in attendance, I am freed from my metal entanglements. All I can feel is the most excruciating pain in my neck. They lay me on the ground, apply a neck brace, and then transfer me to a stretcher in the ambulance. One look at the worried faces of the people around me is enough to send my spirits plummeting. I have been conscious throughout this ordeal and my brain knows that I can’t feel anything below my shoulders, but the rest of my body is resisting this information. We hasten to Darwin and I lie back on the stretcher and hope that this is all some horrible nightmare. I have the staff contact a friend of mine in Darwin to whom I entrust the job of ringing my mother and breaking the news…’
By 9.00am Mum and I were on a plane to Darwin.
We were ushered into where Tracey was and there was a long sheet up to her chin. She has her arms out on extension boards at the side of the bed, and there were two huge spikes buried into her skull with weights at the back of the bed holding her head in place. I have never been able to look at a crucifix in the same way since.
My mother became very clinical and started asking Tracey what she could move. With two big tears just silently dropping down the side of her head my sister simply said, ‘I’m a bloody quad, Mum. I have dislocated the 5th cervical vertebrae and fractured the 6th and 7th vertebrae. This is as bad as it gets.’
Alone in a room on our own, my mother started pacing the floor. She was angry. It was like one of the lioness’ cubs had been left for dead and she going to get who was responsible for it. My mother started asking a series of questions:
‘How could God do this to Tracey? How could God do this to us? What more does God want from me in this life?’ And most hauntingly of all, ‘Where the hell is God?’
These were rhetorical questions, but I was a Jesuit. God was my game, so I ventured an answer. But every time I went to speak my mother bit off my head. At these times we often lash out at the ones who are closest to us. I wanted to remind my mother that I was one of the cubs too!
Still, I plucked up my courage and had, arguably, the most painful and important theological discussion I will ever have in my life. I told my mother that if anyone can prove to me that God sat in heaven last night and thought ‘I need another quadriplegic, and Tracey will do, so let’s set up a car accident to get that happening’ – if this was God’s active will – then I am leaving the priesthood, the Jesuits, and the Church. I don’t know that God, I don’t want to serve that God, and I don’t want to be that God’s representative in the world. So my mother came back at me, ‘So where is God then?’ And I gently said that, ‘I think God is as devastated as we are right now that a generous, selfless girl, who went all over the world looking after the poor, is now the poorest person we know’. It had nothing to do with money. I did not have to choose between a God of love and a God who does cruel things to us. Like the God who groans with loss in Isaiah and Jesus who weeps at his best friend’s tomb in John chapter 11, God was not standing outside our pain, but was our companion within it, holding us in his arms, sharing in our grief and pain.
In the months that followed I got some of the most appalling and frightening letters from some of the best Christians I knew. A few wrote, ‘Tracey must have done something to deeply offend God so she had to be punished here on earth, for God will not be mocked!’ They went on, ‘the only way to know peace with God, now, is to accept his will.’ They actually believe that God gets us. I have discovered since 1988 that this theology is far more common than I would have ever imagined. I have met people with cancer, couples with fertility problems and parents who have lost a child in death who have asked me what they ever did to deserve the curse under which they think God has placed them. I want to weep just thinking about them.
Others wrote, ‘Tracey’s suffering is sending up glorious building blocks to heaven for her mansion there when she dies.’ This is what is usually called ‘pie in the sky when you die theology’. I did not know that in heaven, in the many rooms of the father’s house, there are first, business and economy class suites. For if to get from the shanty town just inside the pearly gates to the best celestial suburb means being washed, fed, turned, toileted and clothed every day for over twenty years now, then I cannot pay the price for the move across town. I think very few people could.
Finally, there were scores of letters and cards which said, ‘Your family is really very blessed, because God only sends the biggest crosses to those who can bear them.’ I always like how some people, who are not receiving that particular blessing, can see it so clearly in other people’s suffering. But let us think about this line a little more. We hear it often. If this line is true, and God thinks you are strong, you are going to be blest with a big cross.
Add to these responses good people who were trying to be comforting, and so gave out the usual trio of replies in the face of bad news: ‘It’s all a mystery’; ‘My ways are not your ways’; and ‘Only in heaven will we find out God’s plan.’ There is a truth in each of these statements, but I am not at all convinced that they are baldly true in the way some people mean them. They are often used by good people to say something they hope will be comforting. It did not have that effect on me. For example, while it is absolutely true that God’s ways and thoughts are infinitely greater than anything we can hope or imagine, invoking Isaiah 55 in the midst of people’s suffering tends to place God outside our human drama, as an all-knowing and yet uncaring observer to the action of our lives. The Incarnation surely shows us that God is committed to being a participant in the human adventure in all its complexity and pain. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus show us that God wants to be known, especially in regard to the moments when we are sometimes given to the greatest despair. He has grafted himself onto human history in the most intimate of ways. We do not believe in and love an aloof Being who revels in mystery and goes AWOL when the action turns tough in our lives.
So I am very grateful to the correspondents who wrote to me after my sister’s accident. They have alerted me to how often we hear some terrible theology which does not draw people to God in the worst moments of our lives. It alienates us.
So here are my seven steps to spiritual sanity when we are tempted, and we give into the temptation, to ask, ‘Where the hell is God?’
1. God does not directly send pain, suffering and disease. God does not punish us.
2. God does not send accidents to teach us things, though we can learn from them.
3. God does not will earthquakes, floods, droughts or other natural disasters. Prayer asks God to change us to change the world.
4. God’s will is more in the big picture than in the small.
5. God did not need the blood of Jesus. Jesus did not just come ‘to die’ but God used his death to announce the end to death.
6. God has created a world which is less than perfect, else it would be heaven, and in which suffering, disease and pain are realities. Some of these we now create for ourselves and blame God.
7. God does not kill us off.
Preface from Where The Hell Is God? by Richard Leonard SJ, Copyright ©2010 by Richard Leonard SJ, Hidden Spring, an imprint of Paulist Press, Inc., New York, Mahwah, NJ. Reprinted by permission of
Paulist Press, Inc.
www.paulistpress.com
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