theology of the downtrodden

[excerpt from a letter I recently wrote]

I am in a stubborn mood, and so I won't commit to whether or not God is "real" -- especially not in the way most people understand God to be. But for the sake of argument and of comfort and of logic, I will say, if God is any kind of real: I don't (and never will) believe God knew my parents would fuck it up this badly... God only knew that they could.

I didn't have to suffer. I didn't HAVE to be hurt. But I was. None of it had to happen. But it did. And that is all on them, on my parents. I was entrusted to their care. They could have made better choices. They didn't. I could have been rescued any number of times, by any number of people. But I wasn't. And here we are.

(I also didn't have to be raped. There is no moral to that story, and I can't tell you how many people I've wanted to punch for implying that there might be. The only thing I might concede to is that my babies had to die... but not for any cosmic reason, and not to teach me anything, and not because God "needed" them in Heaven (what the fuck does that even mean?!) but for the simple fact that my poor body could not support their lives and my own at the same time. This is the saddest fact of my life and I don't know if I can ever truly forgive the people whose fault it is. I do know it's certainly not my own.)

So. I just wanted to offer this to you, despite my ambivilance: never believe for one second that God would want this for me, would choose this for me. That is too ugly to be borne, and it will shatter you. Know that every human makes a choice every minute of their life, and the choices are entirely their own. That is what is so desperate and holy and beautiful and terrifying about humanity, what we wish we could deny. That WE did this. All of us. With our creative power, we did THIS. But we can turn it around, too. That is what power is for. For making things happen. Like it or not, we can't deny our power, or the responsibility that comes with it; we can only decide if we are going to use it to make good things happen, or bad.