Photo by Javier Martínez on Unsplash

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​The Great Sadness in the
Open and Relational God

Open and relational theologians tell us that God's life includes unavoidable suffering. There is beauty in God's life, too. It is a weaving of all the world's experiences into an ongoing whole: a harmony of harmonies. But the beauty includes sadness, a wish that terrible things had been otherwise. God is the soul of the universe: a companion to the world's joys and sorrows. The beauty of God's life is a tragic beauty; and the compassion, the empathy, is what makes it beautiful. No need to turn God into a king on a throne. Let God be, in Whitehead's words, a fellow sufferer who understands. Let there be, in God, not only a great joy, but also a great sadness.

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The great sadness of the open and relational God is a dimension of God's vulnerability. It is God's sharing in the suffering of each and every living being, and God's being unable to change things in a unilateral way, even as God might wish otherwise. We can speak of this side of God as a harmony, because it has a kind of beauty, but divine beauty includes tragic beauty. The One who is more than the universe is also within the universe suffering one or both of two kinds of conflict: (1) a conflict between the way things are and they way things could have been, and (2) a conflict between the aims of individual creatures and the workings of the world. 

The second kind of conflict is readily apparent in predator-prey relations.  As the fox chases the rabbit, both are inwardly propelled by a will to live, and this will is itself how they experience God. The divine lure is in the hunger of the fox and the will of the rabbit to escape the fox.. If the fox catches the rabbit, the rabbit's terror ends in death: a violation of the rabbit's own will to live. Such are the workings of the world. Whether or not this "system" is God's will is difficult to know: I hope not. But God cannot change the system once it once it evolved, so we learn from open and relational theology. However, God can share in the suffering of the rabbit even as God shares in the hunger of the fox. God suffers the conflict; and the conflict becomes part of God's own experience, God's own life. There is beauty in God, but it is tragic beauty. 

The first kind of conflict is especially difficult. We see the suffering and pain that people and other animals undergo at the hands of human cruelty, and we know things could have been otherwise, for us and for God. We are unable to undo it, once it occurs. Still, in fidelity to the reality of the suffering and pain, we carry in our minds the difficult recognition that things could have been different and should have been different. We feel sad. And so it is with the God of open and relational theology. Precisely God is loving, there is a great sadness in God. Patricia Adams Farmer presents it beautifully in the essay below.

- Jay McDaniel, 10/15/22

​​The Great Sadness

Patricia Adams Farmer

We can then see our own suffering as a voluntary participation in the one Great Sadness of God. . . . Within this meaningful worldview, we can build something new, good, and forever original, while neither playing the victim nor making victims of others. We can be free conduits of grace into the world. — Richard Rohr

Recently, my young cat named Oliver struggled with a painful illness, and it occurred to me that my own deep sadness over his distress was something much bigger than me. Remembering a line from Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, I even found myself saying, "It is the Great Sadness." It was as if my cat's suffering was noted and felt and permeated with that same Great Sadness that mourns the death of bees, that same Great Sadness that feels the groans of refugees and hurricane victims and gun violence. Yes, that same Great Sadness feels the suffering of this tiny gray rescue cat. It is the one Great Sadness of God, a sadness that invites us to participate. And when we do, we become channels of grace to the world.

We Are Not Alone

If we believe that God is love and that the future is open, then our sadness takes on a sacred sharing. No longer do we envisage an all-powerful king of the universe who has it "all under control." Rather, we experience the divine presence in terms of radical relationality. In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, "God is the great companion — the fellow sufferer, who understands."

Our sufferings and the sufferings of our world are shared by Love incarnate who is present in every moment, every sigh, every spasm of pain in the tiniest of creatures. This Presence is not the author of suffering, but the Sharer of suffering — the source of transformation, healing, and "resurrection possibilities." This means that instead of our simply suffering and getting released from it, we become something new in the process. We die and are reborn inside the Great Sadness. We experience what process theologians often refer to as "creative transformation."

Sadness is the price I pay for loving my cat, loving others, loving God. But when I choose to enter the Great Sadness, I know that I am part of something larger, cosmic, and deeply relational.

The Great Urgency

Sometimes the Great Sadness is felt as the Great Urgency — an anxious yearning for goodness to triumph, for bees to thrive, for wars to cease, for children to be safe, for a tiny cat to survive. When we are plunged suddenly into the Great Sadness, complacency and petty concerns evaporate. Focus and urgency take over. It is as if we have fallen into deep waters, and with one breath we move urgently toward the light, air — even toward the faintest glimmerings of hope.

As I was seeking help for my cat, I managed to catch Greta Thunberg's impassioned speech to the UN on behalf of the environment. It was as if she embodied the Great Sadness, pleading with us to enter and feel it for ourselves: to know it as Greta and the thousands of young protesters experience it. They invite us into their sadness because they know that it must be entered and felt with their own sense of urgency before any transformation is possible.

The Great Sadness, then, is not simply a place to be unhappy and worry, but rather a place to feel more intensely, to connect, to experience who we are and discover what we have to contribute. When we enter the Great Sadness, what we value becomes clear and what we love is no longer taken for granted. It breaks open our capacity to feel in all directions, and it changes us. It changes the world.

The Woman Who Looked after God

One of the most vital expressions of the Great Sadness is embodied in the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jew caught in the web of horrors that became the Holocaust. Within her luminous writings, which began in 1941, we witness her ongoing spiritual transformation, or what she calls her "uninterrupted dialogue" with God. It is self-transcendent in the tradition of the great mystics. Her focus is not so much about God sharing in her pain, but rather about her sharing in God's pain.

In the first English edition of her diary, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum (1983), we are invited to share in a rare human embodiment of what Rohr means by the one Great Sadness of God. In July of 1942, she pens this prayer: "The Jasmine behind my house has been completely ruined by the rains and storms of the last few days, its white blossoms are floating about in muddy black pools on the low garage roof. But somewhere inside me the jasmine continues to blossom undisturbed, just as profusely and delicately as ever it did. And it spreads its scent round the House in which You dwell, oh God. You can see, I look after You. I bring You not only my tears and my forebodings on this stormy grey Sunday morning, I even bring you scented jasmine. "

Inside her world growing ever darker and more perilous by the minute, Etty offers the urgent prayer "to safeguard that little piece of You, God, insides ourselves." The last sentence of her diary reads, "We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds."
This "balm" she became in the months following. Etty and her family were sent to an internment camp where she helped and inspired all those around her. And then the worst happened. On September 7, 1943, after all efforts to save Etty and her family failed, they were put on a transport train to Auschwitz. But she threw out a postcard from the train that was later picked up by a farmer. It read "We left the camp singing."

She died less than three months later. Thirty-five years later, her diary found the light of day, offering us a way through the darkness of our lives and of the present world — a world that continues to spin dark webs of cruelty and hate.

Her short but luminous life reminds us that that when we open ourselves up to the one Great Sadness of God, beauty emerges, jasmines die and bloom again, and the scent lingers on into eternity. We become "conduits of grace into the world."

​Different Things Together
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In human life many of us are drawn to two competing ideals: harmony and intensity, peace and adventure, order and chaos, unity and individuality, rest and zest.

The philosopher Paul Kuntz argues that Whitehead brings them together. Whitehead reminds us that harmony needs chaos and vagueness; that spontaneity is as important as predictability; that harmony is not always good and disharmony is not always bad; that intense experiences can be ever the more intense because they bring things together harmoniously; and that even as we might enjoy various kinds of harmony, we ought not rest in them too completely, because life includes novelty and incompatible perfections. For Whitehead, so Kuntz shows, Harmony is not stagnation. It is the living reality of differences held together, beautifully, for a time. Different feelings, different ideas, different people, different lives - together for a time.

We might also hope for a certain kind of ultimate harmony, a harmony of harmonies in which the differences are held together everlastingly, albeit in a way that includes zest and newness. This would be a metaphysical harmony or, as it were, theological harmony, because the harmony of harmonies is part of what we mean by God. Whitehead's philosophy invites us to recognize this harmony, too, as experienced in an intuitive sense in a peace that surpasses understanding. If we speak of God as Harmony, we best add that God, too, is in process and that in some small way, we participate in the divine beauty, not by absolutizing our own cherished forms of harmony, but by trusting that there is a Beauty beyond our own, which allows us not to rest too completely in the finite harmonies we enjoy.

And we best also recognize that, however peaceful the harmony of harmonies might be, its beauty includes tragedy. It includes the rabbit chased by the fox, Patricia Adams Farmer's cat, and every single event of unwanted pain that has ever happened in our world or in the universe. It is not a happy beauty in any shallow sense. It is deeper than that. It is a beauty that includes sadness.

- Jay McDaniel, 9/30/2022