My family has traveled through a series of private hells this summer, each cavemouth a little wider and blacker and smokier than the last. I hinted at them, made what sense of them I could, in this essay.
Even in this, I still consider myself a God-chaser.
But how to approach, or what to think of the God, I’m running after?
This God, who knows how the gin goes down and how far my favorite shortstop ranges to his left; who charts the tuning of each note before it leaves Michael Stipe’s throat and measures the exact span of every sunset in every corner of the sky over every city on Earth every evening.
I am clueless at the prospect of reconciling this great God-knowledge with the permission each hell has to open up and swallow me and my beloveds.
A couple weeks ago, between and just before hells, I cracked the binding on David James Duncan’s Sun House, his first novel in more than 25 years. Across early pages, Duncan plays both narrator—addressing the reader personally—and a sort of omniscient collector, gathering a group of spiritual seekers whose lives begin to warp together.
Tracing one thread, Duncan introduces a young Jesuit, reluctant to console those left to grieve a young Mexican child who dies in what’s either a freak accident or an epilogue to the book of Job. The priest preaches the only funeral sermon he knows, immediately feeling all the failure and cold comfort in it. He prays the child’s father will raise his fists and beat the life from him.
But the bereaved father, who has no other surviving family, only thanks the priest in simple terms. Each unprovoked repetition of gratitude travels through this supposedly holy man like a goddamn shiver.
The priest begins arriving unbidden at the father’s door, and they spend evenings sitting together, often in silence. Until one night.
On that night, the father opens the chambers of his beliefs to the Jesuit, relaying some of the truest wisdom on grief I’ve read. Leave the God-words to the mourning, he says. When a priest invokes God’s will over death, he brushes heresy. When a wounded father does, he calls down the Holy Spirit.
Somewhere in this soliloquy, where Duncan binds together Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene and Shūsaku Endō and fulfills Franz Wright, the novelist speaks through this father, past the priest, straight to me:
It also seems you are taught, you priests, to defend your God, but never to blame Him. This is a mistake. When we blame God, two things happen. One, He becomes present. He is now there with the sufferer, taking blame. And two, why not blame God? He’s God. He can take all the blame there is! Go ahead! Blame Him! It keeps Him with you!
I have spent my whole life, it seems, learning to defend God. And when, this summer, he seemed indefensible, I lost my voice. But a man in a novel by another man ushers in another God, one who fears no blame.
And while I still cannot see my way past this hell or the next, I now have a stranger’s prayers to rehearse, and words to keep me company.