Twenty seventh Sunday 1996 (#2)

Twenty seventh Sunday 1996 (#2)

The Exasperation of God

There is, of course, the immediate business of the vineyard that God had planted, and watched over, and taken care of, etc., etc., etc., which by the way was a standard metaphor in the Hebrew Scriptures and, as we see, in the New Testament, for God’s people who are therefore the recipients of all kinds of attention from God..., but rather than talk about this vineyard, I’d like to talk about something that underlies the first and third readings especially, but is not talked about very much any more, and that is, for want of a better way of naming it, the exasperation of God. Does God ever get exasperated? Well, even knowing that this is metaphoric language, these two texts precisely say that God gets exasperated. Just like all language about God, whether we’re talking about the love of God, or the jealousy of God..., it’s all metaphoric language, but that doesn’t make it meaningless.

First of all, I think it’s interesting to look for just a minute at why nobody talks about the exasperation of God anymore. I think that God has been made, to a large extent, into a gigantic teddy-bear: "Sweet God, God is non-judgmental, God is a sweet-heart and is always there for me, etc., etc., etc... There are certain truths in that, but it seems pretty clear to me that that truth has been purchased at the expense of a whole lot of equally significant truths, and that through the course of it God has been trivialized. Could such a God ever become exasperated? It doesn’t seem so.

Another reason that people of my generation, there are a few of us still left, and maybe even younger, feel that what has pushed the exasperation of God out of the market, so to speak, is that a lot of people, and you still find comedians today, have made whole careers out of it. I’m talking about guilt as being the most important product of Catholicism, and making people feel guilty is all that Catholics are interested in doing: "Oh, you must be Catholic, you have a guilty conscience..." Well, that’s not even a half-truth, I don’t think, because I’ve thought about this and lived long enough to come to the conviction that guilt is as normal a human phenomenon as is breathing, and you don’t have to be Catholic, or Jewish, or religious at all, for that matter. Guilt is some sense of failure, some sense of deficiency. Who is free of that?

The thing that put me most in mind of that is when I was a TA at the University of Toronto a long time ago. I had this wonderful little seminar group that I met every week, and in our group was this quite attractive and very gifted girl: she was a poet, she was a musician, she was into drama and all kinds of other things. Well, one day when I was sitting in my room there was a knock at the door and here was this same lovely girl and she said, "here’s your essay," and then she immediately burst into tears. Well, what could I do? I invited her in and asked her what was wrong. Do you know what was wrong? She was feeling profoundly guilty and distressed because her report wasn’t good enough, her music wasn’t good enough, she didn’t spend enough time on her acting, and her dancing wasn’t good enough... There was all this stuff and she had this terribly exaggerated sense of who she should be and she wasn’t there, and for this she felt terribly wretched... Guilty because she wasn’t there. Who does not feel that way?

So it’s not just a Catholic thing, not by a long-shot. But that story about my former student has other implications too, I think, because it clearly illuminates another issue: namely, that guilt is not some kind of uniform fact. There is the guilt of the three year old who wets herself before she could get to the toilet, or who is found with a hand in the cookie jar, or found beating the cat..., and they all know that as soon as the parent finds out there will be some kind of great uproar. There is that kind of guilt, and it is true that a lot of religious guilt is structured precisely that way: "wait ‘til God gets home and finds out what you’ve been doing..." In other words, the guilt that comes precisely from the position of a little kid whose life is lived in terms of someone else’s expectations... And I’m not sure, and I’m sixty-one, that I’ve overcome that entirely..., I’m embarrassed to say, but I don’t know too many people who have either, so I’ve got lots of company.

God could be exasperated because she would say to me: "Trojcak, for God’s sake, grow up, if you’re going to feel guilty, feel guilty like an adult human being instead of like a little kid." What does that mean? What does adult guilt look like? It is a guilt which precisely arises when I examine my own life in the light of what I believe to be God’s concern for me and my failure to respond to that concern..., my failure to act responsibly, for example, or my failure to stop trying to please people, because I’m afraid of what will happen if they don’t like me...

But look at how that’s built. I have to recognize it in myself. It is not God pointing some big hairy finger in my face telling me to get with it. It is Trojcak who knows about his faith in God, who has given him life and wants, above all, for that life to grow, in fact, to be outgrown all the time...; and it is Trojcak who knows about himself, and is constantly falling back into some kind of immature, fear-filled, dishonest, kind of behaviour. Can God get exasperated by that? Yeah, I think so... It’s a whole different thing than this kiddy-shaped guilt. What does God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Isaiah, Moses..., basically want of us? God simply wants us to grow up and mature. We believe that that’s why God gave us life. If I resist that, I don’t just resist God, I resist myself and my own humanity, I also resist coming to connect with everybody else. And in the sense that I diminish myself, I therefore make myself a less worthy partner for another human being, and for all the rest of the human beings...

So God says, "Yeah, I’m tired of all this rubbish, c’mon, grow up, and in doing so, grow into yourself, grow closer to others, and certainly grow closer to me. If you’re going to feel deficient, that’s the measure.

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