At War with God
“If you ask me if I’m at war with God, I likely will tell you that I have no idea what you’re talking about. I am a Christian, and Christians know that God loves us. He’s not a war with us.” — The Deepest Place, Curt Thompson, MD
Have you ever attributed your sufferings in life to the fact that you may be at war with God? Possibly, in your deepest places of difficulty, this thought has crossed your mind, as you have felt that God is to blame for all of your pain. However, most of the time, you may likely agree with Dr. Curt Thompson that God loves you and that He is not at war with you. Nonetheless, in his book The Deepest Place, Dr. Thompson delves into the reality and context of our suffering as human beings and helps to make a clear connection between how suffering well can actually lead to the formation of hope. He shows that it is through opening our wounds up to God and others in a safe environment, receiving support and counsel in our vulnerability, and creating memories of these new, wholesome relationships that we are able to form anticipations of a better future, which is essentially hope.
The origin of humanity’s suffering stems from our separation from God and His original plan for creation. While not getting too deep into the theology of original sin, many theologians, including St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, agree that suffering is a natural consequence of being finite creatures and living in a free existence. As such, we find that our early human history passed through a period of falling away from its originally intended design. Soon after our first parents’ creation, Satan tempted them to believe that “God is a tyrant who is at war with us and [who] does not want us to become like him;” in this way, “evil tries to get us to forget that we already are like God.” We were originally created very good in His image, meant to live in communion with God and others. Yet, from the start, Satan set us up to believe that we are at war with God.
Nonetheless, by being tempted to go beyond our human nature, by attempting to determine what is good and what is evil, Adam and Eve became separated from God and from each other. It is fundamentally through this “isolation [from God and each other] that is the first step that leads to war.” Unfortunately, the sufferings of human history, and our own traumas, “were born in the context of intimacy.” We were originally made to exist in mutual love for God and our neighbor. Yet, from the origin of the human race, this design for community was disrupted. And, “since the first violation involved God” and “all of these events took place well within the earshot of God,” we have “set him up as the source of pain.” From our perspective, God becomes a reasonable target for our war to defend our own autonomy as He seems to be the one who is keeping us from becoming who we want to become. However, sadly, we see that this presupposed state of violence begets further violence, as exemplified in the stories of Cain and Abel and countless other Biblical and cultural origin stories.
Many other cultures also have this idea of being at war with the gods. Most ancient societies tell stories of the gods subjugating humanity to suffering at the whim of their own capricious desires. As such, many peoples are habitually fearful of the gods and offer sacrifices to appease them. We have perpetuated these existential conflicts throughout human history by means of wars, conquest, and enslavement. Still, “in all of our wars with each other, we have been at war with God from the beginning as well.” These examples of strife can all be traced back to our original separation from God and our fellow human beings.
Further, today, we often find ourselves at war with the smaller, modern gods that we have in our lives (pleasure, power, profession, perfectionism, perceptions, etc.). Elevating these worldly objects to the status of idols further draws us into this divine war because they can never satisfy us, yet we see God as keeping us from finding fulfillment in these earthly goods. Nevertheless, in our relationships with others, “every act of envious, lying, stealing, adulterous murder that [we] commit toward someone else merely holds the object of [our] violence as a proxy for God.” Eventually, we can come to believe that all suffering is as a product of being at war with God. Truly, “it is not difficult in these, the deepest place of suffering, to believe, albeit quite unconsciously, that the God of the Bible is indeed at war with us.” However, the more that we entrench ourselves in these perceived wars with God, the further we cement ourselves in our sufferings.
Surely, our crosses are not always all our fault. Yes, often we can create and perpetuate our own difficulties. But, sometimes, our trials are the results of what others or the world do to us. They can also be due to our pursuit of the life that God calls us to live, in the midst of our current circumstances. For, “the work of becoming like Jesus . . . will necessarily introduce us to unique suffering in that it is explicitly about choosing to live in the age to come while we still occupied this present one.” As followers of Christ, our earthly sufferings are not taken away altogether (John 16:33). Actually, by following Him, we may become more acutely aware of our present pains and that we are still a long way off from attaining the eternal life that Jesus promises. Nonetheless, we can come to realize that “between [evil], the world, and the flesh, we are still in a war. Just not with God.” Rather, through allowing Christ and others to enter into our sufferings, we can develop a hope that does not disappoint, of which St. Paul speaks in Romans 5:1–5:
“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access [by faith] to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
In a psychological sense, much of our sufferings are based in a wounded sense of attachment to God and to others. Numerous psychologists (including Bowlby and Ainsworth) have contributed to the area of attachment theory. Essentially, there are four types of attachments (secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized) that we start to form when we are infants and which are solidified in our developmental years. What type that we settle into can continue to affect how we react to the events of our lives as we grow older. Ideally, we want to have secure attachments with God and others. For, it is there that we can feel safe, secure, soothed, and seen.
Unfortunately, many people develop disordered attachment styles due to traumas that occur in their early lives or due to the perpetuated unhealed wounds of one’s family history (passed down from grandparents to parents to children). These disordered attachments form due to the fact that our brain is “one large anticipation machine.” The more that we are shown evidence that we do not live in a safe world, the more that we will come to expect future injury and the more difficult it will become to believe that good things will eventually come (as I note in “It’s Something I Deal With”). Additionally, though with good intentions, others may try to positively persuade you to “just look on the bright side” or “just change your mindset,” in your times of difficulty. However, these intended encouragements do not primarily acknowledge how incredibly challenging it is to rewrite our hardwired neural networks, especially when our present life continues to give us proof to embolden our sense of learned helplessness.
Additionally, inherent in the experience of suffering is the reality that we do not know how long that it will last. If we do know that a pain will end, it is a lot easier to endure. However, the agony of not knowing if or when we can expect anything different further leads us to wallow in the woes of our wounds. Sometimes, we can forget who we are apart from suffering, we do not know how to exist without suffering, and we fail to remember that we were not initially created to live in this way. Nevertheless, this inability to know how long we have to bear our pain can lead us to be more anxious and/or avoidant toward God and others. Sometimes, we can feel shameful about not being able to hope. However, if in our past experiences we were not safe, secure, soothed, and seen, it makes perfect sense why we would not reasonably hope for that in the future.
We can also struggle in our attachment styles based on how we deal with the parts of ourselves that are formed in the times of our traumas. From our early development, certain psychological parts of ourselves can become wounded and trapped in these states of sufferings (as described in “The Parable of the Parts: The Return of the Prodigal Son and Internal Family Systems”). Throughout our lives, we can return to reacting out of these younger selves that are still at war with God and others. However, “the parts of us that still believe we are in a theater of war require nothing less than to have someone we trust usher us into a place of peace.” Ultimately, that person is Jesus Christ and those who make up His Body, which is the Church. Through allowing others to enter into our wounds, we can “end this war not by getting rid of these parts, but by healing them.” It is by naming our wounds, telling our stories, and allowing others to re-establish secure attachments with us in those deepest places that our brains can start to form a hope that does not disappoint (as I detail in “Crossing the Liminal Space”).
When we are able to become securely attached to God and others, we can find this hope in the fact that our sufferings on this earth are not the end. When “we are securely attached to Jesus, then, ultimately, we live in a safe world.” However, it does not mean that nothing bad will happen. Rather, “what [this safety] does mean is that when, in the turbulence of life, we are secularly attached, we are ultimately safe.” Through Christianity, we learn that there are boundaries that we have to live within and that there is always the opportunity for forgiveness and redemption (between ourselves and God and ourselves and others). Nonetheless, it is by striving to live close to the heart of Christ that we are able to form hope in the midst our difficulties.
As such, the cross can ultimately become a Trojan horse through which God enters into our wars against Him. By taking up our sins and sufferings upon Himself, not only did He save us from death, but He shows that He is “a God who has initiated the peacemaking process” and “a God who has never been at war with us in the first place.” When God and others, through His Body, enter into our sufferings, they can show us that our present afflictions are not the end of the story and that we can actually form hope because of them.
Seeking healing in our sufferings naturally necessitates endurance. When we acknowledge and address our wounds, we practice perseverance. This is to “practice, repeatedly, bringing your story of suffering into the presence of a vulnerable community that invites you to do so,” which naturally “strengthens your capacity to persevere.” Dealing with our difficulties inherently requires that we be dedicated to our pursuit in a community with others. Contrarily, “the degree to which [our] suffering persists is directly correlated to the degree to which [we are] alone with all of [our] painful sensations, images, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions of [our] experience of life and the overarching narrative that combines all of them together.” When we allow ourselves to be overcome by our wounds, we can instead fall into perseverating (versus persevering) on them and become overwhelmed by their apparent qualities of being personal, permanent, and pervasive (as highlighted in “From Darkness to Light: The Allegory of the Cave and Getting Out of Your Head”).
Nonetheless, at times, we have to allow ourselves to feel this weight (in a safe environment) to be able to move forward. For “inherent in the lament of perseverance is our commitment to be willing to repeatedly enter a cycle of grief.” Only when we allow ourselves to fully experience our wounds and have them witnessed in a caring community can we “release [our ancient stories and coping strategies] in order to make room for beauty and goodness.” It is essentially through repeating this process over and over that we are able to continually heal from our past traumas. As, “what we pay attention to repeatedly we remember, and what we remember becomes our anticipated future.” In this way “hope . . . becomes something that we form by persevering.” It is a long, cyclical process, but by addressing our sufferings with endurance, we can take the next step on our journeys toward restoring our relationships with God and others.
Character is formed by enduring in this renewed secure attachment style. Basically, “what we pay attention to, we practice, and what we practice, we become;” further, “character is continually being formed by what we are practicing becoming at any given moment in time.” According to Hebb’s axiom: the brain’s neural networks wire together as they fire together. Or, in other words, you become what you think. Therefore, we must surround ourselves with a community that supports our thinking well. In the right setting, character is “formed as [we allow ourselves] to be loved in those moments in which [our] less favorable personal characteristics are on display.” Our disordered attachment styles will never be healed unless we allow others to safely enter into those deepest places in which our wounds reside. Additionally, God desires to enter into this healing process with us. In this way, “we become what we practice paying attention to, and paying attention to the mechanics of how God is forming us in any given moment is a significant step toward co-laboring with him in that formational process.” Through the repeated, embodied experience of our healed character, we can come to see that God is not actually at war with us and that He desires to join us on our journey toward hope.
Our relationships with God and others, which were injured originally in the fall of humankind, are ultimately redeemed by Christ and His Body through the formation of hope. Character creates hope through repeated experiences “in the present moment of being loved in an embodied fashion.” These encounters help to reverse our wounded attachments and reiterate secure attachments to God and others. For, “hope is something we form in response to the loving presence of someone else.” When we reciprocally exchange love and attention with Jesus and the community of His Body, we can come to hope that we will continue to experience such secure attachment. It is this reinforced “greater payload of neutral real estate that represent[s] earned secure attachment.” This renewed, embodied hopeful way of thinking can help to carry us along our journey with a newfound perspective on our suffering (as expounded upon in “Hope Sinks”).
In our existence as finite creatures living within the reality of freedom, suffering is a natural result of the fall of humankind. It originally stemmed from a sense of isolation and broken relationships created between ourselves and God and ourselves and others. Our own embodied wounds can perpetuate suffering in our daily lives by affecting how we view our attachment to God and others. When were learn by experience that the world and others can be unkind to us, we begin to fear that they will always act in that way toward us. Further, we reflect these feelings toward God because, at times, it can seem that He just idly stands by as the war rages on against us. As such, we can start to believe that we are actually at war with God.
However, God does not take away our pain because, in His infinite love for us, He has always respected our freedom to turn away from Him. Nonetheless, He never turns His back on us. Instead, through the person of Jesus Christ, He is able to bring about deeper relationships with Himself and others through our sufferings. Though our crosses may seem relentless, we must remember that they are not the end of our story; there is the promise of heaven and there is Someone there who eternally loves us and is calling us back to Him.
Additionally, in our pursuit of this love, we must remember that it cannot be earned. True love (whether from God or another person) is a feee gift. However, unfortunately, in almost every human relationship, there are separations and wounds between both parties. Believing that we must do things to receive love is a product of the fall and our broken attachment styles. Our faulty human love, which has been disordered for generations, continues to make us believe that we must do certain things to earn another’s love. Additionally, at times, we can believe that others’ lack of love toward us is due to something that we are doing wrong; but actually, true love should be a free gift of oneself for the good of the other person. Others failing to show us this love is not our fault. Thankfully, there is One who’s love is never-failing, if we but open ourselves up to Him and His Body, the Church.
Still, God does not always explain the reasoning for our sufferings to us. Rather, He uses them to bring about greater conversion and goodness (written about in “In Atonement for Our Sins and Those of the Whole World: Offering Suffering as Reparation for the Misuse of Free Will”). It is we who seek an explanation to understand and control, or be in charge of, our suffering. However, if we truly desire to be healed of our broken relationships with God and others, we must trust Him that He is calling us to something greater out of our weaknesses and sufferings (as explained in “The Gift of the Cross: A Gift to Fill That Which is Lacking”).
In the end, as St. Paul states in Romans 5:1–5, we cannot form hope without character, and character without endurance, and shockingly, endurance without affliction. Reminiscent of the Felix culpa, without the opportunity of suffering, we would not have the chance for so great, so glorious a redemption. We would not have the ability to become who we are meant to be without the realities of our crosses. In a psychological sense, we do this by opening up our wounds to others in a safe environment, which allows us to reshape an embodied secure attachment style, which leads us to create memories of said attachment style. This habituation allows us to form hope about future secure attachment with God and others. Further, the more that we visit our deepest place in a safe space, the more that these traumatized memories will be encoded in a hopeful way, such that we can respond from these restored recollections the next time that we experience a similar situation (instead of reverting to our traumatized parts’ reactions), helping us to not only heal our past, but also to better deal with our future suffering as well.
In this way, taking up our crosses does not mean just sucking it up and walking in line behind Jesus. It means dealing with “the suffering of swimming against the current of the old stories [we] have carried for most of [our] lives . . . allowing [ourselves] to become increasingly receptive to love . . . [and] enter[ing] into those painful parts of [our] story to which [we] have not yet given [ourselves] access in the presence of Jesus and others.” Likewise, answering God’s call to follow Him (by living out the Commandments/Beatitudes/etc.) is only scary and repulsive because of our fears and wounds. Due to the broken relationships and attachment styles formed after the fall of our original parents, we can be led to believe that we are at war with God because He is keeping us from knowing good and evil and from controlling the realities of our lives (as this was the first temptation of the devil in Eden). However, as our Creator, God’s will is truly what is best for us. The way that He calls us to follow Him is unique to His plan for each one of us. In reality, it is by calling us that He wants to lead us through the deepest places of our sufferings into the light of eternal life. With His grace, it is in the journey from our afflictions, through perseverance, to character, that we are able to form a hope that does not disappoint.
