The Bargain

Religion is easier when life behaves according to sequence: obedience, blessing; transgression, consequence; prayer, answer; suffering, redemption. We prefer a God whose movements can be anticipated because predictability gives us the illusion of control. If righteousness reliably produces prosperity, perhaps catastrophe can be kept away by becoming sufficiently righteous.

The bargain is ancient: do this and receive that.

Pray this prayer. Complete this sacrament. Earn this degree. Enter this vocation. Marry correctly. Believe correctly. Raise your children this way. Find the right church and spiritual director. Assemble the correct inputs and wait for heaven to produce the desired output.

But life keeps violating the formula.

The righteous become sick. The dishonest prosper. Marriages blessed before altars disintegrate. Children die despite rooms full of people praying for them. People survive decisions they believed would destroy them and later build lives of astonishing beauty. Institutions created to protect the vulnerable sometimes become the places where vulnerability is exploited.

The problem may not be God. The problem may be the bargain.

God is not a process, a pedigree or a program to which we apply, nor an equation we manipulate until Providence yields the answer we requested. A catechism may teach us about God. Sacraments may orient us toward God. Scripture may reveal God. Institutions may preserve wisdom about God.

None possesses God.

That is why I have become suspicious of a phrase I once found comforting: God is greater than the highs and the lows.

Certainly.

But greater can become another word for distant. It can place God safely above the blood and mud of human existence, receiving our gratitude for the beautiful things while remaining curiously insulated from the terrible ones.

I have lived too much life to believe in so sanitary a God.

Holiness and Horror

Travel long enough and eventually you discover that holiness and horror are capable of sharing an address.

I have cared for people carrying histories of trafficking, exploitation, abuse, abandonment and betrayal in their bodies. I have treated them, listened when the clinical questions ended and the human story began, and participated, however briefly or imperfectly, in their healing.

Nursing has given me an intimacy with suffering that statistics cannot provide: the privilege of entering another person’s life at the strange intersection where biology, memory, fear, family, faith and survival meet.

Some were harmed by strangers. Others were harmed by people they loved. Some were harmed by the very communities they trusted to protect them, educate them or teach them about God.

Once you have sat close enough to suffering, sanitized theology becomes difficult to tolerate.

I have watched institutions speak eloquently about human dignity while people beneath their roofs wounded one another. I received part of my education in Flint while an American city became internationally synonymous with contaminated water.¹ I have lived in a country that offered me extraordinary opportunity while watching immigrants and people perceived as outsiders repeatedly transformed from human beings into political abstractions.

These contradictions belong to the human story.

Mexico gave the Christian imagination Our Lady of Guadalupe. For nearly five centuries, the image of a brown Virgin appearing to an Indigenous man has carried extraordinary religious and cultural meaning across the Americas.²

Mexico also gave the Catholic Church Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ.

For decades, Maciel moved through the Church surrounded by prestige, access and religious authority. Eventually, the institution that had elevated him had to acknowledge the devastation associated with him. The Holy See described his conduct as gravely immoral and acknowledged a system in which obedience and silence helped protect a charismatic founder while those who challenged him could be marginalized.³

Guadalupe and Maciel belong to the history of the same country.

Peru offers an equally uncomfortable juxtaposition. Peru gave Christianity Rose of Lima, the first canonized saint born in the Americas; Martin de Porres, remembered for tending the sick and poor across the racial boundaries of colonial Lima; and saints such as Turibius of Mogrovejo, Francis Solano and John Macías.⁴

Peru also gave rise to the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae.

Its founder, Luis Fernando Figari, was eventually expelled amid grave allegations of physical, psychological and sexual abuse, including allegations involving minors.⁵ After years of investigations and revelations concerning abuse and corruption, the Vatican suppressed the organization.⁶

Eventually came an image more powerful than an ecclesiastical decree: churchmen kneeling before Indigenous people and asking forgiveness.⁷

The institution that had taught generations of people to kneel eventually found itself on its knees.

Both histories remain.

The saints remain saints, and the victims remain victims. Beauty does not erase corruption, and corruption does not retroactively erase every act of beauty. God must somehow be spoken of without lying about either one.

That is where cheap theology fails.

A God present only in Guadalupe but absent from the cries of victims is too small. A God confined to Peru’s canonized saints but nowhere to be found when religious authority becomes abusive is not the God described by the Psalmist.

“If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.”

Psalm 139:8⁸

Presence is not approval. Permission is not command. Evil does not become sacred simply because God does not immediately prevent it.

The more unsettling proposition is that human evil cannot manufacture a territory outside God’s domain. Neither the victim nor the perpetrator, the person who speaks nor the institution that refuses to listen, the believer who leaves in disgust nor the bishop who eventually kneels exists beyond God’s reach. That shared reach does not erase their different responsibilities.

History becomes ugly without God ceasing to be God.

The Dangerous Beatitudes

Perhaps this is why the Beatitudes are more dangerous than the embroidered versions hanging in our homes suggest.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

Matthew 5:4⁹

We have heard the sentence so often that its strangeness has nearly disappeared.

Christ does not bless those who successfully avoided mourning or tell us to construct lives so carefully protected that grief can never enter them.

That matters in a world obsessed with avoiding discomfort. We curate friendships, neighborhoods and churches around people who look, vote, worship and live like us, until almost everyone confirms what we already believe.

Safety slowly becomes sameness, and sameness can masquerade as peace.

Christ does something else.

He crosses boundaries, eats with people whose reputations precede them and touches those others refuse to touch. He approaches the sick, the poor, the ritually unclean and the socially inconvenient. He allows himself to be interrupted, confronts religious authorities and enters homes where his presence becomes scandalous because of who else has been invited.

Christ goes toward the rejected.¹⁰

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Matthew 5:10¹¹

The persecuted person can therefore be the blessed person. The rejected person can be the righteous person. The person condemned by the community can remain inside the blessing of God.

Institutional rejection and divine rejection are not synonymous.

That distinction matters wherever human beings claim authority over the boundaries of God. Catholic authorities have condemned Freemasonry for centuries.¹² Catholics and Protestants have condemned one another. Religious institutions have censured, expelled, excommunicated and anathematized. Governments have invoked God while persecuting minorities. Communities have invoked morality while protecting prejudices.

Human beings are remarkably talented at constructing a fence and then placing God’s signature beneath the permit.

What happens when the person we condemned is among those Christ calls blessed?

A collar cannot settle that question. Neither can a ring, a lodge, a title, a degree, a pulpit or an ecclesiastical office.

Jesus offered a less glamorous standard:

“You will know them by their fruits.”

Matthew 7:16¹³

History has a way of eventually inspecting the orchard. But the Beatitudes offer more than a standard by which to judge the fruit. They proclaim a God who redeems: who meets mourners with the promise of comfort and those who hunger for righteousness with the promise that injustice will not have the final word. The blessing does not make the wound good. It declares that the wounded are not abandoned.

For me, these histories are also personal. I spent two semesters at the University of Pennsylvania, where I began graduate studies and often attended Mass led by priests associated with the Sodalitium. Those priests were my spiritual fathers. Patrick and Michael were my brothers in Christ. I broke bread with them. I miss them.

I carry a similar affection for the Legionaries of Christ I knew at Duke University. We spoke deeply about theology and Scripture, and I encountered men whose disciplined devotion to Christ was the work of a lifetime. That encounter matters to me. It cannot acquit an institution or cancel another person’s testimony, but neither can I pretend that the brotherhood was unreal.

Holding these things together is part of what it means for me to trust in redemption. God can redeem what human beings have wounded without excusing those who wounded it. Truth must be spoken, harm confronted and the vulnerable protected. Enduring brotherhood does not release us from those obligations; it makes them more personal.

The God We Made Polite

Perhaps one reason we struggle with these contradictions is that we have edited God.

We like the Christ who blesses children, heals the sick and forgives sinners, but become uncomfortable with the Christ who overturns tables, condemns hypocrisy, calls religious leaders whitewashed tombs and even curses a fruitless tree.¹⁴

Yet Jesus also weeps, grows exhausted, loves, withdraws, experiences anguish and bleeds.¹⁵

Which one was not God?

The same hands that heal can overturn tables. The same mouth that speaks forgiveness can pronounce judgment.

This does not sanctify every human temper—cruelty does not become righteous because we attach Jesus to it—but neither is emotional flatness holiness. There is an anger born when love encounters something intolerable.

Christ was peaceful. Christ was not passive.

And eventually, every Christian attempt to understand suffering arrives at a place where politeness is no longer possible: Calvary.

There Is God

Christianity eventually has to stand beneath the Cross because every comfortable theology becomes inadequate there.

Betrayal is there. Religious politics are there. Government cowardice is there. Torture, humiliation, blood, a mother watching her son die and friends suddenly difficult to find are all there.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Matthew 27:46¹⁶

If suffering proves God’s absence, Christianity collapses at Golgotha.

Instead, Christianity makes its most audacious claim precisely there. It points toward a condemned man hanging from an instrument of execution and says:

Not observing safely from heaven. There.

This does not make torture holy or injustice Providence. It does not mean crucifixion becomes good because resurrection eventually follows it.

It means suffering cannot, by itself, prove God’s absence because Christianity has already placed God inside suffering.

The Cross destroys the convenient division in which God receives the sunrise but not the hurricane, the birth but not the funeral, the wedding but not the divorce, the healing but not the diagnosis.

But Calvary creates another question, perhaps the hardest one:

If God is there, why does God permit any of this?

The Terrible Gift

The biblical story confronts us early with the terrible gift of choice. It explains something about the harm we cause, though it cannot explain every form of suffering.¹⁷

Human beings can choose against God and against one another. Love can become possession; authority, exploitation; religion, control. Sexuality can become violence, wealth can become greed, and communities can exclude the people they were meant to shelter.

Freedom has consequences, and the cruelest part is that those consequences do not remain with the person who chooses.

A drunk driver makes a choice and another family buries someone. A leader chooses war and children inherit graves. An abuser chooses secrecy and another person may spend decades understanding what happened. An institution chooses its reputation and victims discover that truth can be treated as an inconvenience.

This is where “everything happens for a reason” becomes dangerous theology.

Sometimes something happens because somebody chose terribly. Sometimes because of disease, biology, weather, greed or systems constructed long before we arrived. Sometimes we simply do not know.

God’s sovereignty does not require us to rename every catastrophe God’s desire. If everything were simply what God wanted, repentance would become meaningless. There would be no reason for prophets to denounce injustice, for Christ to overturn tables or for anyone to be commanded to change.

Human freedom can produce terrible things without human beings ever acquiring the power to dethrone God.

That is the terrible gift: we are free enough to wound one another, free enough to love one another, free enough to walk away and free enough to return.

And knowing that does not necessarily make us less afraid.

The Biology of Fear

People like to say Scripture contains 365 commands not to fear—one for every day of the year.

That number should not be treated as a fixed biblical total. Any count depends on the translation and which expressions are included.¹⁸

The saying is better understood as a devotional reminder than a precise count, and perhaps that is appropriate: even if Scripture contained 365 of them, there would still be a 366th morning when someone wakes terrified.

Fear is older than theology. It lives in the body. Long before human beings wrote catechisms, nervous systems learned to detect threats. The heart accelerates, attention narrows, muscles prepare for danger, and memory marks what hurt us so that the body may recognize it when it approaches again.¹⁹

A person can believe in God and still tremble. As a nurse, I can recognize the mechanisms of stress and still feel my own pulse quicken. Even a mind full of comforting verses cannot simply argue the body out of fear.

Perhaps courage was never the absence of this response. Perhaps courage is what happens when fear is permitted to speak without being permitted to become sovereign.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

Psalm 23:4²⁰

The Psalm speaks from within the valley, not from a safe place outside it. Its declaration of trust does not make the danger disappear. The reassurance lies in the presence of a companion:

That is a very different kind of reassurance. It does not require me to pretend that I am unafraid, call danger imaginary, or describe grief as secretly pleasant. It asks something simultaneously smaller and more difficult: keep walking.

Sometimes faith feels triumphant. At other times, faith is simply taking the next step while the nervous system continues insisting that the world is dangerous.

Sometimes I walk afraid. But I walk.

God Is Not the Prize

Perhaps much of my spiritual confusion came from treating God as the reward at the end of a successful life: choose the right vocation, enter the right institutions, earn the right credentials, love faithfully and endure well. Then, somewhere beyond all of that effort, receive peace.

But that returns us to the bargain. If God is merely the prize for arranging life correctly, then every collapse becomes evidence that either I failed or God did. Maybe neither conclusion is necessary.

Maybe God was never waiting at the finish line. Maybe God was present while I was running—in achievement without being reducible to it, and in failure without becoming its author. Present when institutions welcomed or disappointed me, when people loved me well or failed me, in hospital rooms where healing occurred and where it did not.

The Christian claim is more intimate than that: God is Emmanuel, God with us.²¹ His presence does not wait until we have overcome fear, understood grief, forgiven everyone or become impressive examples of resilience. God is with us before any of that has happened.

And He is already here as the God who can redeem. The lows are not beyond His reach: He can meet a wounded life with care, bring hidden wrongs into the light and open possibilities for healing where we could see none. That does not mean He authored the suffering, needed it to happen or required someone to be broken so that something beautiful could follow. A good that grows after harm does not justify the harm.

The highs, too, can be redeemed. Achievement can become service instead of self-importance; security can become generosity instead of indifference; joy can deepen into gratitude instead of becoming proof that we are favored over those who suffer. Even what I call success may need to be freed from the bargain.

His redemption reaches beyond and between those extremes, into ordinary days whose meaning I cannot yet name. I cannot dictate its timing or promise another person that every loss will be repaired in this life. I can believe that neither devastation nor accomplishment exhausts what God can do, and that His work does not depend on my calling evil good.

This does not answer every question. It answers a different one.

Where is God while the question remains unanswered?

Perhaps the answer is the one I have been circling throughout this essay: God is already here.

The Highs and the Lows

Perhaps there was never an altitude at which God suddenly became present. I kept imagining life vertically: the highs of achievement, education, love, friendship, travel and service; prayers answered in ways I could recognize; moments when the future seemed open. Then the lows of loss, betrayal, fear, exhaustion and grief; unanswered prayer; the strange loneliness of feeling alone among other people.

I wanted God to explain the distance between them. Instead, perhaps God was in both—not because every high was a reward, every low was a lesson, suffering becomes beautiful when enough time has passed, or everything happens for a reason, but because neither joy nor suffering possesses the power to create a world from which God has been expelled.

There are things I would never choose again, wounds I would never romanticize and questions for which I still have no satisfying theological answer. There are people whose suffering should never be converted into somebody else’s sermon. And there are beautiful things for which gratitude remains the only reasonable response.

Both are true. The world is beautiful and terrible. We are capable of astonishing mercy and cruelty. Institutions can preserve wisdom and betray it; faith can console and be manipulated; the body can heal and fail.

Within those contradictions, I continue looking for God. His transcendence does not place Him beyond our reach, and His presence does not depend on my understanding. I look for Him within the human story itself.