On anger at God, doubt, and faith after a death · by Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC
There is a question that arrives in the night and does not leave politely. It comes after the phone call, after the room empties, after the casseroles stop. It is rarely spoken aloud, because speaking it feels like a betrayal. How could you let this happen? And underneath that one, quieter and more frightening: are you even there at all?
If you are holding that question, I want to say something you may not have heard from the people trying to comfort you. You are not failing at faith. You may be doing the oldest and most honest thing a believing person can do.
There is a man in the Torah named Jacob who spends a whole night wrestling a stranger beside a river. He does not win. By morning his hip is wrenched, and he walks with a limp for the rest of his life. The stranger, who turns out to be no stranger at all, gives him a new name. Israel. The name means one who wrestles with God. An entire people took their name from a man who would not let go of the fight. Not from a man who accepted quietly. From a man who argued until dawn and was marked by it.
Sit with that for a moment. The tradition did not name itself for serenity. It named itself for the struggle.
What you are standing inside has a name in my work. I call it Complex Post Traumatic Spiritual Development. The length of the phrase is the point, because every word is carrying weight. It is post-traumatic. It follows something that broke the world open. But it is development, not damage. The questions that feel like the collapse of your belief are often the framing of a larger belief being built. You cannot see the new room while you are standing in the rubble of the old one. That does not mean nothing is being built.
I am not going to tell you what to conclude. I hold a lamp, not a map, and in this work the maps get burned anyway. I am not above you with answers. I am on the path, too, a few steps over in the same dark, and my son is the reason I know this ground.
Cameron crossed eighteen years ago when he was thirteen. I have stood exactly where you are standing, furious at a sky that would not answer me. Cameron said something to me once, before he crossed, that I did not understand until long after. He said, "I heard someone say that your cracks are where the light gets in, but I don't think that's true, Papa. I think our cracks are where our inner light gets out." He was twelve. He had taken a piece of received wisdom that most adults repeat without examining, and he had turned it the right way around. The crack is not where something enters you. It is where what was always inside you finally gets out.
Doubt is a crack. It is not faith draining away. It may be faith, the real one, the one buried under everything inherited and automatic, getting out for the first time. A belief that has never once had the freedom to have been angry has never been tested. A belief that cannot survive honest fury was not yet yours. It was on loan.
People ask me whether their person is truly still anywhere. I do not answer with a slogan. I answer with what I am willing to stand behind. The energy of a life is not subtracted from the universe. That is not a comfort I invented. It is the first law of thermodynamics, and it holds whether or not anyone finds it consoling. What that energy now knows is a larger question, and I will not pretend to have settled it. I can tell you what I have come to stand on, in my tradition and in my bones. Always here. A little ahead.
So if you are wrestling tonight, love, wrestle. Let no one shame you into letting go before dawn. The limp you carry afterward is not damage. It is the mark of the one who stayed in the fight, who did not look away, who held on long enough to be changed by the holding.
I keep a circle for people who are exactly here. We gather, and no one is hurried toward acceptance, and no one is asked to stop arguing with the sky. If you would like company in the dark, there is a door, and it is open. You do not have to walk through it tonight. It will still be open when you are ready.
Rev. Rabbi Henry-Cameron Allen, OCP, ICGC
TheVirtualHermit.Quest
Yes. In the Jewish tradition an entire people is named for a man who wrestled God until dawn. Anger at the sacred is not the failure of faith. It is often the most honest form it takes.
Not necessarily. A belief that has never been tested by honest fury was inherited, not yet chosen. Doubt can be the older, automatic faith giving way to one that is finally yours.
A name for the spiritual upheaval that follows a shattering crossing. It is post-traumatic, but it is development, not damage. The questions that feel like collapse are often the framing of a larger belief being built.
The energy of a life is not subtracted from the universe; that is the first law of thermodynamics. What that energy now knows is a larger question I will not pretend to have settled. In my tradition and in my bones: always here, a little ahead.