Experience of God?

Yesterday evening, a small group of people, mostly young and some significantly older, gathered in a small café in my neighbourhood to discuss the events of the Occupy Montreal movement. We talked about what has been going on there—downtown—and about the reality of poverty and exclusion in our own neighbourhood. We asked ourselves what this meant for us, whether the movement had something also to say to us. We asked whether we also, in our own neighbourhood, should not find some way to “occupy.”  We don’t know what that means or how it could happen but, we asked the question and we decided to come back to it—soon.

Saturday, some of us will go down to the Occupy site, along with people from around the city. We will form a human chain around the site and spend a half-hour in silence meditating on peace, peace for the people at the site, peace for the movement, peace in all they struggle for.  Afterwards, we hope to be able to return regularly. We do it as an act of solidarity; we do it also to transform our own “positioning” in the world. We do it in order to say something to society but without words, in pointing to others and the “word” of their lives, of their engagement.

For me all this is connected to a question that has haunted me for decades: the question of God.

Europeans have said: How can we continue to believe in God after the Holocaust?  Latin Americans have asked how they can believe in God during the repression suffered during the 70s and 80s. Today we might well ask how we can believe in God while living under the totalitarian global capitalism of today? The fact is, many don’t. 

Living in Peru during the 1980s, I sometimes asked myself if God were not absent from the violence-torn country?  It was very difficult for me to find the presence of God in the midst of crushing poverty, death-dealing illness, severe repression, tens of thousands of assassinated and disappeared.  Yet there is something central about the notion of God’s presence in the suffering and in the death.

At one point, I have been told, Ivan Illych was giving a talk in a large auditorium, not long before his death. During the question period, someone asked him how he managed to avoid despair in situations of the major repression and violence, which, at that time, engulfed all of Latin America. There was a very long silence, then he called to a colleague, who was seated nearby, to come up beside him. He put his arm around him and replied “a friend.” 

That’s not a very theological answer but in practice it opens an important path to deal with the question of God. Today, it has become extremely difficult to talk about God. God is hidden and silent. Theology has become bankrupt largely. However, and I would underline this, the urgency, even the imperative of speaking to God is paramount. We have a desperate need to speak to a God we do not understand, and probably never will. We cry out our horror, our anguish, our longing, our desperation in the face of the world as we find it. It is the very depth of our being that cries out and, it seems, that is where, finally, God “appears,” silently, without words, without solution, right in the cry itself. We need to stay with the cry itself, our cry. Not a scream, out of control, but a cry that mobilizes all the energy within us.  

In liberation theology, the first step indicated was the call to make a choice, to take up a different position – physically. We had to move out of our everyday, normal environment in order to go to the place where the poor, the excluded, the repressed, the non-persons were and to plunk ourselves down in their reality. (Even the poor had to make the choice since they were often trying desperately to get out of that reality!)

It seems to me that something similar is still very necessary, at least for those of us who are privileged not to live in misery. We have to choose to immerse ourselves in the reality where God is absent and does not speak, where God is silent, where the easy discourse of theology and homiletics is muted. If we choose to move, it seems to me that what happens is that God also chooses to move, to accompany our move. God still remains the silent Other, but that Other becomes located in the non-persons who, because we are there, cast their gaze upon us, a very disturbing gaze, a profoundly questioning gaze. And it is in the profound depths of the silence that underlies their gaze that we are challenged. It is then, I believe, that we experience God, not seated on a lofty throne governing the universe, not ruling over the cosmos, not defeating the embattled armies of evil, but rather dwelling deep in the gaze of those others, those non-persons. The silence of God is an experience that calls to us nevertheless. For out of God’s silence, we are empowered to cry out and to mobilizes our forces. It is a cry that transforms since it is rooted in God’s silence. It seems to me the issue is not so much the experience of God finally as it is the question of God, or perhaps better said, our questioning of God! And that questioning is itself the experience.