When God Gets the Blame

Linda Fatticci was a pastor’s wife who loved the Lord and served as an active partner in her husband’s ministry for two decades.

But when she became a widow with three adolescents at 46, she became so angry with God that she yelled at him.

“What are you doing here? I don’t understand,” Fatticci, a substitute teacher, remembers shouting while driving alone. Even when she took walks with a friend, she let God have it. How could he let John, pastor to the deaf at First Baptist Church of Lakewood, die of cancer? How could he let him suffer for four years? “We were doing everything right. We were honoring you!”

Historian Gerald Sittser had also long been a man of faith. An ordained minister with a doctorate in the history of Christianity from the University of Chicago, Sittser served as a pastor in Los Angeles before taking a professorship at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash.

But after witnessing three generations of his family--his mother, wife and a daughter--die in a head-on collision caused by a drunk driver, he felt betrayed by God. “I’ve been faithful to you for years,” he remembers crying in anguish. “How could you do this to innocent people?” He scoffed at the notion of prayer.

Even people of abiding faith can find themselves railing at God after irreparable losses. Fatticci and Sittser believe the anger, though surprising and sometimes guilt provoking, was a necessary part of a journey that strengthened their faith and stretched their souls.

Wrestling with God in the darkest moments, they say, led them to conclude, much as Job did, that God is too great for us to understand. That realization made other people more precious to them and allowed them to grow more sensitive, more loving, more generous with their time.

The Old and New Testaments are rich with people who implored God in anger, disappointment and frustration. “The book of the Psalms, which is the primary devotional literature of the whole Bible, is full of complaints,” said David Augsburger, professor of pastoral care and counseling at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

A long list of men who encountered God--Abraham, Moses, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea and Amos--expressed anger as well as submission, said Augsburger, a clinical psychologist, ordained Mennonite minister and noted author. Even Jesus cried out from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Augsburger, who trains ministers and clinical psychologists, said people who are upset with God should vent their anger. Anger, he said, is simply a demand for justice. Repressed, this demand turns to guilt: the grieving person’s belief that he, or even the person he lost, was in some way responsible.

“When you validate their anger, the demand doesn’t spring back and boomerang on them,” Augsburger said. His first aim in trying to help people who are angry with God is “to invite them to express fully what’s in their pain, hear the pain and encourage them to go on to lament it.” When they lament, he said, they are crying out, not only to the listener in front of them, but also to God.

“Our churches and society tend to give us messages that it’s not good to be mad at God; it’s blasphemy, we’ll be struck by lightning or that we’re not enough of a person of faith,” said clinical psychologist Michele Novotni, co-author of “Angry With God.”

Because God already knows everything about us, including our attitudes, it’s best to be “open and honest about our anger and let God do the healing,” said the Rev. Mark Brewer, senior pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian Church.

When Brewer was a junior in high school, his father, a pastor in Colorado, left his family and the ministry to marry his secretary. Two years later, Brewer’s fiancee was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

Then, over the next 15 years, his older brother died of leukemia and a younger brother, a Presbyterian minister in St. Louis who had lost a leg in a train accident and was suffering depression, committed suicide, leaving behind three children, two of them disabled.

“Lord,” Brewer remembers thinking the day he stood over his fiancee’s body, “if this is what trusting you means, I want to renegotiate the deal.”

Some of the tragedies in his life--Brewer calls them “big waves”--made him want to get far away from God. Yet, try as he might, he couldn’t. God “was holding my boat and wouldn’t let me go.” He compares his experience to that of a toddler, kicking and screaming in a father’s strong arms. After ranting, he finally let God hold and hug him.

Brewer said people of no or little faith are less likely to become angry with God because their expectations are lower. “But when you come to an understanding that the Lord is in control, then you want to say, ‘Why did you allow this?’ ”

Psychologist Novotni compared reconciling anger with God to patching up a relationship with someone close who has hurt us, so that we’re eventually able to say, “I don’t know what to do with this piece, but because this relationship [with God] is important, I will not let that be an obstacle.”

That’s the approach John Fry, a Costa Mesa psychologist, and his wife, Elizabeth, an attorney, took in the loss of their twins.

Jonathan and David died in October after they were born prematurely. Despite his years of training and counseling others, John Fry wasn’t prepared for it.

“Confusion and puzzlement were part of my experience,” he said. “How would God allow something like this to happen?” he asked. His anger made him uncomfortable.

“How can the clay [Fry] tell the potter [God], ‘You’re making me wrong?’ ” he said, paraphrasing Romans 9:20,21: “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ Does the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?”

Eventually, Fry let God off the hook. The idea of forgiving God seemed presumptuous, but he made himself tell God: “I don’t know why [you took the babies], but I love you anyway.”

“I still have times of real sadness, hoping that some day I will see my boys,” Fry said, his voice cracking. Elizabeth Fry, who has compiled a scrapbook of pictures of the twins, consoles herself that God let her have “my boys,” even if only for a brief time.

I sought out Fatticci, Sittser, Brewer and the Frys weeks after I too wrestled with God.

I never thought that I’d be shaking my puny fist at the God I had praised, trusted and worshipped all my life. But when my younger brother--my only sibling--died suddenly last month, I was furious.

“Why?” I cried out. Emmanuel, a gentle soul who played violin and piano beautifully, was only 48. He had no history of heart trouble, yet he died of cardiac arrest shortly before we were to have a cookout on a Friday evening after work.

His was the seventh death in four years in my inner circle, including both parents. I couldn’t fathom why God was sending so many deaths my way.

“If you want to crush me, how about doing it quickly?” I told God. “Thanks to you, I have more people I love on the other side of the great beyond than here.”

My fury shocked me. But it also prodded me to find others who had experienced it. To reread the Psalms, Job, Lamentations. To read half a dozen books, ranging from C.S. Lewis’ “A Grief Observed” to Philip Yancy’s “Disappointment with God” and Gerald Sittser’s “A Grief Observed: How the Soul Grows Through Loss,” which I found especially helpful.

The people I interviewed, the books I read and a friend named Charles, who comes to see me every evening to hear me sigh and mutter “What’s the meaning of this?” have put me on the road to healing--and to forgiving God.

“Sorrow never entirely leaves the soul of those who have suffered a severe loss,” Sittser writes in “A Grace Disguised.” “Deep sorrow often has the effect of stripping life of pretense, vanity and waste. It forces us to ask basic questions.” Already, I can sense that my faith will grow, even as I continue in my struggle to understand the meaning of my brother’s early death and ponder what I can do to bring the good out of the sorrow.

“It’s big of God to allow us to be angry with him,” said theologian F. Dale Bruner of Pasadena. “The Psalms are at least half complaint, and God seems to have encouraged those prayers to be put into his book because he knew how angry people would understandably be with him and with life.

“God apparently knows very well that he does not always seem to be very thrilling or to be sitting all that wisely on his throne.”