Can you actually HATE God ?

There’s an old Catholic saying that goes, “If you’ve never cursed God, you’ve never known Him.”

But is that God, or only an idea of God, that you hate ?

I’m not sure, the Prophet’s often felt cursed by God and let Him know it, and perhaps this wrestling with God is part of what makes us human.

After all, if God created all this mess, isn’t He ultimately responsible ?

I’ve heard the apologetics : perhaps God isn’t all-powerful, or at least not how we think of power, perhaps God had to divest Himself of His power, maybe God has a morally sufficient reason to allow suffering, maybe there’s an entire level of reality and conflict we can scarcely conceive of, perhaps we ourselves WANT this reality - one where we can act against the Tao of the Universe to do what we wish, but that therefore brings death and decay into the universe, perhaps it’s up to us to sanctify the world with God’s grace, and only our refusal to bring creation to God causes the world to hurl into chaos, how can our small minds comprehend these mysteries, let alone pass judgement on them ? And on and on.

I can only say that Christ is who I worship. I worship the God who hates death, who is scandalized by evil, and who weeps at injustice. Christ came to save us from all that. God Himself became man, died for us, grafting human nature onto Divine nature to raise us up out of this evil world.

This is the inexplicable power that, however rare, we come across when confronted by real acts of love and charity. So often I’ve been about to tilt into the abyss, and cried out in prayer, and a force wells up and rescues me from plunging into utter despair.  We all know this power exists.

We know God loves us, against all the evidence of evil, because He sent a light into this dark world to illuminate His true nature - that He is love. We can know that God is love by participating in His life in the Eucharist and liturgical rituals, shaped and oriented toward this revelation until it lives inside us.

We can trust the experiences of the saints, who have committed their lives over to this Mysterious power. Their lives, abundant in fruitful works of great love, all testify to these truths.

The rest is intellectual theologizing. Why does God allow suffering? What happened in the Fall? No one knows. 

There are stories that point, I think, to something true - that we live in some kind of metaphysical catastrophe, in Genesis with its two creation versions - the first being perfect with no death, that are trying to tell us something, that this world with death was never God’s intention, and the author of evil lies in another Power, an enemy of God.

Christianity is not a philosophy, not a series of propositions to affirm or deny, it is a Way of life. Truth is a person. Christianity is participating in the life of God, getting to know Him, being fitted for a new existence after death to live with Him.

What we do know is this power can rescue us from death, and it lays out a way, the Cross, to accept the senseless affliction of existence, deny ourselves, and put ourselves under judgement.

This is the power I worship - love in Christ, foolishly, against realty, even against God Himself if He refuses to give back my loved ones and wash them of all affliction. I stand by the power that condemns all death and suffering, and if I were to find God is part of those powers then I would condemn Him too.

God is utterly transcendent, every concept of Him inadequate and false. We know very little of just what the hell is going on in this universe. 

 I end with a few passages by possibly the greatest living theologian, David Bentley Hart :

“There lies in this expectation (of the resurrection), necessarily, a kind of ultimate defiance of “reality,” and even of God if he will not raise the dead… "

"If, say, the Jewish child who choked to death in a cloud of Zyklon-B is not restored to a life that is more than life, is not given joy and eternity in his own person, is not given back, then why should we care what private intimations of transcendence Jesus might have experienced on the cross? And why should we want to find ourselves embraced in the arms of the demiurge whose world thrives in the death of children?"

“Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. 

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy.”