Bruised Reeds, Smoldering Wicks & the Peaceable Divine Transcendence: Against God as Superman
by the Rev. Dr. Kirsten L. Guidero
Since many readers may not know me, a quick introduction seems in order. I am the middle of three daughters; I am currently wearing overalls; I have too many books in my office and too many home improvement projects in progress. I love live music, good food, and goofy or deep conversations shared around a bonfire. And I attended Church of the Resurrection (Rez) for almost ten years, moving from emotionally stunted college student to super-committed lay leader to finally aghast and wounded departee.
Over the past several months, I’ve heard from a few folks who, like me, once called that parish or its diocese home but who are now (also like me) processing what it means to acknowledge that the very same people who seemed to foster such intense spiritual growth in their lives are also responsible for perpetrating, enabling, and covering-up systemic abuse. A common refrain in my own head as well as from others goes something like this: “How is this possible? How could I have grown so much, experienced God’s presence so clearly, in the very same context that also committed such grievous evil?”
I no longer belong to this denomination, so in many ways I am on the periphery of ACNAtoo efforts. Nevertheless, I share the following as a snapshot of my own ongoing process, hoping that all survivors may find solidarity even as recovery specifics vary. Processing the dynamics I experienced at Rez continues to be informed by my study of theology, especially by reclaiming what historic tenets of the faith affirm about God’s identity and ways of relating with the world. (Note: where I reference or quote, this does not entail unequivocal support for all the source has ever said or done or stood for or for all that they may ever say, do, or stand for; I simply find helpful the specific point I mention.)
Who is God?
The standard Sunday School answer to this question points to Jesus. We recite that God is made known in the person of Jesus Christ, who as the incarnate Second Person of the Trinity perfectly reveals God to the world. In other words, in Jesus, we get God’s divinity revealed in a human person. Yet when I discuss Christology with college students, we realize that we struggle to understand this. We keep thinking that if Jesus is fully God and fully human at the same time, one of the two natures must take charge over the other.
Most often, we think that his divinity must overpower his humanity, like a puppeteer pulling strings. I call this tendency “Superman Syndrome.” We struggle to view God as anything other than a superhero, blasting into our world to solve our problems by sheer force of will. God is alien to us, something so estranged from our reality that for God to show up in our lives, it will look like Superman soaring in to stop a runaway freight train. And, of course, to activate those powers, he has to remove his humanity, ripping off Clark Kent’s glasses to reveal that super-snug suit. Jesus, then, images God by making his humanity a shell for his divinity. I think this sense continues to shape much of our spirituality.
How does God work?
If God relates to us like Superman, then our spirituality will consist of negating ourselves. We imagine God interacting with us from the top down: a God who, in order to save us creatures, must swoop in to overwhelm and obliterate our creatureliness. We think God saves by reminding us of how broken and needy we are and by standing against such neediness like a cosmic eraser or a ride off the planet. God must break all our notions, loves, personality--even our agency--so that God can pull the magic strings that will get us out of whatever mess we are in.
So we might be used to considering spiritual growth a matter of finding good stand-ins for God, of appropriately submitting to people whose closeness to God gives them the authority to shape our identities in this same top-down manner.
Reclaiming Jesus: God present with and for us
The God as Superman perspective is attractive, but it is heretical. It denies Christ.
As theologian Kathryn Tanner points out, divinity in Jesus’ Greco-Roman context refers to “[the] most powerful, self-sufficient and unchanging among beings” (God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988], p. 39). Christian Orthodoxy affirms instead that God is not a being among beings. God is involved with the world at an even deeper level: as the Creator who most intimately knows and grounds all that exists. Because God our Creator provides the ground of each being’s existence, God’s presence remains the most interior, gentle, and safe core we may ever know.
As Paul proclaims in his speech at Athens, God cannot be contained by temples (or clergypersons, or a particular parish, diocese, or denomination) because God the Creator is already available to everyone. God “gives all people life and breath and everything else” (Acts 17: 24-25). God is therefore perceivable by anyone, even if we just have ourselves to contemplate: “he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being…We are his offspring’” (vv. 27-28). Biblical scholars William M. Wright IV and Francis Martin (†) note, “God is present to all things in the depths of their being, and God keeps them in existence at all times” (Encountering the Living God in Scripture [Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2019], p. 154). God’s call therefore resounds from inside us.
God’s proof of this available presence is Jesus, in whom humanity and divinity do not make war but rather remain fully present together in one person. In Jesus, the Trinity affirms that the particularities of creaturehood are beloved by God. In Jesus, God remains present to, without overpowering, all of what it means to be human. In Jesus, we know that all creatures live and move because God shares that power with us, making us God’s own children.
The life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ therefore do not argue a case before a begrudging Trinity that since this one human utterly debased himself to win a prize for suffering the most, God should concede to rescue the rest of us out of our creaturely existence. No, they show us who God has always been and always will be. The God made known in Jesus Christ, the God who chooses a peasant teenager for a mom and enjoys feasting with the outcasts of his day, does not glorify human suffering but shows us tender presence in our midst. It is for joy that Jesus walks this earth (Heb. 12:2), not because he has a martyrdom complex. This kind of God is and was always already Immanuel: God for us.
Reclaiming collaborative, preferential spirituality
Therefore, our spirituality does not need to consist of desperate attempts to find or earn God’s presence. God is already available, relating to the world from the inside out in a non-violent, non-invasive manner. There is no such thing as God-less space or time.
There is nowhere God cannot be found.
Even the scariest, most desolate places can shine with God’s own deeply dark presence because neither time nor space nor isolation nor death nor the most craven acts can limit God’s love for God’s beloved children.
If you are worried that affirming this availability might foment an abuse apology or tell people to just find good in the terror they suffer from others’ violence, let me be more specific. God does not desire or need anyone to suffer in order to save (2 Peter 3:9). God is not found in control, coercion, manipulation, or demands for compliance at the expense of one’s integrity. God’s safe and intimate presence is not located in behaviors that embody the opposite of God’s own character. God’s presence and actions always hold a particular character, the character Jesus Christ makes known.
Isaiah, the early church’s famous “fifth Gospel,” describes how the servant upon whom God pours out the Spirit sets everyone to rights by pursuing justice and healing for those harmed by the powerful: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness he will bring forth justice; he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth” (42:3-4). God is found neither in manufacturing dramatic emotional highs nor in compulsive pressure, but in doing right and loosing the bonds of injustice (52-53, 58). That is the good news of Jesus Christ.
The Gospel accounts continue to show us that God’s power is not neutral sheer force, sometimes hurting and sometimes blessing, sometimes gentle and sometimes violent, available for the taking by the haves against the have-nots. God’s power is not like Superman’s! As Jesus notes, Beelzebul cannot cast out Beelzebul (Matt. 12:27). Instead, Jesus’ life demonstrates that God’s power is always directed towards the specific end of promoting goodness and justice for the ones bound up by others. God’s non-violent, peaceable and powerful presence is always with and for that which bears witness to God by honoring God’s good creation; always against that which denies God’s ways.
In situations of abuse, then, God stands with the one(s) being harmed to affirm their dignity and integrity. The heart of God concerns being with and for those who have suffered.
The peaceable transcendent God
Our peaceable, present God puts a finger on the scale for those who suffer. God takes special care of them. God draws safely close to meet their needs. God promises to be found by those who yearn and ache for the divine presence (Jer. 29:13; Lam. 3:25; Luke 11: 9-10; James 4:8).
And this is so for all who have ever come to a church seeking God in neediness, loneliness, longing, or fear. Therefore, if you came to a church searching for God and you experienced God showing up in your life in that place and with those people, it may be less about the actions of those up front and more about the longings of your own heart connecting to God’s character.
Wherever you received goodness, it came from God at work in you, not from those who may have acted at times as if they owned all that God has to offer. Any times they may have participated in God’s ways can be honored. But any growth you noticed is less about you passively receiving something others had mastered and were doling out, and more about you and God collaborating. Less about you earning God’s presence by measuring up to the standards that were pressed upon you from the top down and more about God noticing, cherishing, and responding to you, meeting you where you were and tending to you from the inside out. More about you acting in faithfulness to honor God in return. Less about the majesty of leaders who created scaffolds of power and control and more about the non-violent God safely caring because that’s just what God loves to do, wherever you are.
Someone is going to ask, what about an abuser, a murderer, a quencher of bruised reeds and smoldering wicks? What about all those passages in the Bible that talk about God’s wrath and just judgment? Isn’t God violent against sin? With many of the church mystics, especially Denys the Areopagite and Julian of Norwich, I suggest that any wrath or violence is not to be located in God but rather is found on our end. God might not approve all that we do, but God as Creator still remains safely closer to any bits of goodness in us than we are to ourselves. We experience judgment if and when we refuse to seek God’s justice and enact repentance, because in denying God’s ways we enact violence against ourselves and others. Rather than a violent interposition, those who embrace accountability to God’s ways experience the freedom of putting first the needs of bruised reeds (for more on these considerations, see Denys the Areopagite, The Divine Names in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid [New York: Paulist Press, 1987]; Julian of Norwich, Revelation of Love, found in The Showings of Julian of Norwich: A New Translation, trans. Mirabai Starr [Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Road Publishing, 2013]; as well as anything by David Bentley Hart. For a more approachable take, consider C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce).
This is why it is so important to ensure we are actually being faithful to the character of Jesus, that we are not confusing our own wrath with divine conviction, that we are not laying heavy burdens on folks while telling them this is God’s love. In order to be faithful to how our Creator God shows up all over the place, churchy people must continually consider pushback, including from those outside Christianity. A spirituality grounded in the non-violent God revealed by Jesus Christ alleviates suffering and removes power plays. The Church is not exempt from this accountability.
So, too, then, God’s finger remains on the scale for those who have suffered and are beginning to speak out, as well as for those who don’t have the words or cannot yet safely speak them. To slap Matthew 18:15-20 or 1 Corinthians 6:1-7 in the face of those who are painfully narrating at great personal cost their stories of being harmed commits a gross category error.
Abuses of power by clergy or sex offenders do not fall into the role described by these passages: peer ‘brothers’ with whom a difference of opinion can be addressed one-on-one. They automatically belong to the category Matthew 18:6-7 and 10-14 describe, of facing dreadful consequences for willfully causing the littlest ones to stumble, as well as 1 Corinthians 5:1-2 and 6:8-20, where the arrogance of not addressing the sins of the ones in positions of status makes the whole community share in the same immorality as the perpetrator.
I am heartened by the Scriptural accounts of those who get in others’ faces to make their needs known: from Abraham bartering over Sodom and Gomorrah’s fate to the overwhelmed Moses and Elijah demanding rest and help, from Mary Jesus’ mother forcing his hand at Cana to the Canaanite woman fiercely advocating for her daughter. If we are to be faithful to the peaceably good and transcendent God, we must honor God’s presence in those who will not deny the truth of what was done to them, who refuse to be silenced, who press for justice and accountability.
God can also be found as we discern where we have harmed ourselves and others in our search for acceptance by those who wielded shame against our most fragile parts. Since God is not like Superman, God can mend all these places and more, from the inside out. If your journey is anything like mine, you may find yourself re-evaluating what you consider healthy spirituality and growth. You may decide to put aside some of the things you thought were spiritual maturity but which you eventually realize are actually methods of control, shaming, or manipulation.You may start to identify ways you were taught that God’s presence would be recognized by how much pain a teaching or practice caused. You may need time and space, and maybe time and space away from Christian stuff, in order to heal that damage. You may need to relearn what is true safety, joy, and flourishing. This, too, is good news for bruised reeds and smoldering wicks.
The Rev. Dr. Kirsten L. Guidero is a priest in the Episcopal Church, a professor, and the human caretaker of the world’s best dog, Lucy.