Where is your god now?

“Where is your god now?”

This phrase was uttered to me recently by my mother. It’s a difficult phrase, one that has not been far from my mind since it was throw out at me. It was said in pain and anger so I’m trying not to dwell on it, chalking it up to the pain of possibly losing a close friend. For you see I’m been praying for quite sometime for someone who is by all accounts, dying.

It is not easy to experience the pain and suffering that come from a long drawn out death and even while I write this I’m cautioned from sounding too certain that death will be the ultimate outcome of this struggle. But I can hear it on my mother’s voice when we talk about it, her feelings of the inevitability of this outcome for her friend. My first reaction was “it isn’t my god, its just god, your god, mine, everyone’s” but I held off on the snarky comment that was itching to pop out.

In the course of our talk I happened to mention to my mother that I’d been praying for her friend to which those words were then thrown out at me “yeah well it doesn’t seem to be doing much good…where is your god now?” I could hear the sarcasm, the naivety and the pain underling those words. Its hard enough I’m sure for my mother to deal with the pain that I know she’s feeling. The pain that I can do nothing to ease but say I love you, I’m here for you and yes I’m praying for your friend. I wish that my prayers would be answered but I’ve never been naive enough to think that I’ll get everything I want or that I can even approach knowing what purpose this pain serves.

Questions about why good things happen to bad people and why bad things happen to good people have been pondered by people far greater then myself throughout the centuries. At one point in my life I thought that somehow understanding that there is a plan, that good is not always rewarded with good and that we are merely dust in the wind would somehow make me feel better in times of pain and sorrow. But for me knowing why does no such thing, there is a disconnect between my intellectual ability to know why and my emotional feelings of but why me? Why now? I tried to convey all this to my non-believing mother with little success. I could hear the bitterness in her voice, and I understood. But still its hard not to feel in moments like this that she does not understand my commitment to an observant life. I’ve learned through experience that non-believers seem to think that leading an observant life, dedicating ones life to god is an escape, that it’s a shield used to deflect facing up to the grim realities of life. For me it has never been this way in fact it just the opposite. Being observant doesn’t let me run away from the harsh realities of life: it forces me to confront them.

Everyday in the early hours of dawn I think of my mother’s friend and others, fighting for their lives. I take time in my prayers to ask god that they be given the strength and courage to keep going and to overcome the sickness that’s ravaging their bodies. I don’t know what the outcome will be, that I leave up to god. What I do know is that in asking for them to be granted all those things I am reminded of them myself, and it makes me more aware and more easily able to face my own battles each and every day armed with those tools.

The Chief Rabbi of England Jonathan Sacks says that prayer is not about transforming the world around us, it’s about transforming ourselves. That through this internal transformation we can bring about a transformation in the world around us. It is impossible on an emotional level to truly understand the place of suffering in this world. But that shouldn’t stop us from fighting, from living, from laughing and from thanking god each and everyday for each and every moment we’re given, and that is exactly where my god can be found.

L’Shalom