This Holy Week I have sat with affliction.
I have pondered the great suffering and abandonment in our world.
I think of those who know war, famine, oppression; children torn from their families; those who die lonely deaths in dark places. Those who live under the yoke of injustice.
Why?
For a First Nations person and Christian there is no more chilling prayer than the prayer of the forsaken.
The French philosopher and Christian mystic, Simone Weil, called affliction "the chill of indifference".
It is, she said, "the metallic chill that freezes all those it touches down to the depths of their soul".
Affliction is the cold hand of fate. The afflicted know that cold touch. First Nations people, the poor, the sick. The LGBTIQA+ people recently attacked outside a church by others proclaiming the word of God.
Simone Weil said of affliction that it "is anonymous. It deprives the victims of their personality and turns them into things."
The afflicted cry out: Where is God? How can a God who wills all, allow such horror?
Where was God?
This year, as Australia prepares to vote in a referendum that could grant First Nations people a Voice in our own country, I am confronted with the suffering of my people. We who have felt the metallic chill of indifference.
Where was God when our land was invaded? Where was God when we were killed in the Frontier Wars?
Where was God when men wielding bibles sought to "Christianise" us by stripping us of our own culture?
Where is God when people of faith in my family labour under injustice?
These questions shake my faith to the core. But I don't ask, Does God exist? As a Wiradjuri person that would be absurd.
I was born into the wonder of God. Every tree is God's cathedral and every bird is God's choir.
We call God Baiame – the creator spirit. Baiame gives us our law. Our land.
We didn't need white people to bring us God. And my people read scriptures and read in Jesus an ancestor.
As my Uncle Wongamar – a spiritual leader who preached in our mission church – said, Jesus was a tribal person like us.
He was occupied and railed against empire and injustice.
First Nations theologian Anne Patel Gray recovers the Aboriginal Christ: the Christ, she says, "who is to be found among the oppressed here in Australia".
She calls out Australian Christians who fail to find "the compassion and love that is needed to stand and struggle for justice".
The darkest depths
I don't doubt God's existence. But I must ask: Is God just?
This question has taken me to the darkest depths of my soul.
And there in my abandonment I know I am not alone. At Easter I look to the meaning of the cross.
Jesus died a death of affliction: my God, why have you forsaken me?
The German theologian Jurgen Moltmann says the "cross unites Jesus and his followers".
"Jesus dies in complete solitude," he says. "He descends alone into the hell of abandonment by God."
This is the dark night of the soul that Saint John of the Cross wrote of.
The 16th century monk suffered. He was jailed and tortured. In his darkness he came closer to God.
"This divine wisdom is not only night and darkness for the soul, but is likewise affliction and torment," he wrote.
Few, he said, are called into the dark night, but they know God in ways others cannot.
This is "the ray of darkness". People have always cried out to God.
Within affliction there is hope
I have turned to Lamentations, the saddest book of the bible, maybe the saddest words ever written.
The people of Jerusalem despair at the destruction of their city, ransacked by the Babylonians.
"How deserted lies the city…
"Bitterly she weeps at night…there is no one to comfort her…
"Her foes have become her masters…
"This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears."
Children are starving. The warriors have been slain. Mothers eat their offspring.
"The Lord is like an enemy."
How these words cut to the core of my people's affliction.
I must ask: What have we done to deserve this?
Lamentations offers no easy respite. There is no prophet to lead the way. There is just the "metallic chill" of indifference.
"I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord's wrath;
"He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light; indeed he has turned his hand against me again and again, all day long."
My people know the darkness. We know we live in the world, the fallen world of our free will. A world where evil is real. A world where God is distant.
Like the people of old Jerusalem I lament and I know that while there is judgement on those who do evil, in my affliction there is judgement on me too.
What do I do in the midst of suffering? Do I fall to resentment and vengeance? Is that not the greater affliction, to be defined by suffering; to become a mirror image of our persecutors?
In affliction I am presented with a choice: surrender to the hopelessness brought upon us or to reach for hope?
"The Lord is good to those who hope in him."
I was raised by people with hope in God. A hard hope. The despairing hope of a people forsaken. A people who wait for God's justice.
This is the core of my faith. It is not for me to ask questions of God but God to ask questions of me.
In God's absence, God lives
Miguel De Unamuno the Spanish writer called this congoja – pain and anguish.
"Christ came to bring agony," he wrote, "struggle, not peace."
I read the scriptures through agony and faith and I pray for God's revelation to me. I read those who have struggled under the weight of their own affliction.
Jewish writer Elie Wiesel survived Auschwitz. He had to confront God's utter abandonment.
In his book, Night, he recounts watching a young man hanged by Nazis. Someone asks: Where is God now? And young Eli hears a voice inside him say: "Here he is, he is hanging here, he is hanging on his gallows."
Wiesel is stripped of his innocence. God is dead. But God is also dying with his people.
Jurgen Moltmann says those who follow the Cross "too know the desolation of the God who is far off".
Simone Weil said that God withdraws from the world. It is this space that allows us to live.
In this space we suffer. But I find that it is in God's absence that God lives. It is the fact that the world is imperfect and at times evil that God can be revealed.
For what would God mean in a world of perfection? These are the things Simone Weil contemplated.
God may leave the world but God leaves the trace of love. God waits.
We are God's lament. We are God's suffering. At Easter, I know that Jesus Christ took all that suffering upon his body and died and rose.
As African American theologian James Cone said: "Christ is the reconciler … the liberator … sent from God to give wholeness to broken and wretched lives."
The sun will rise tomorrow, even on a scorched earth. And we will rise to face light or darkness. To choose.
These things are hard. Faith is hard. It is tested. And it is a mystery.
Only the afflicted know truth
I can understand why some cannot believe.
But I do, and that makes this question even more brutal. Where is God?
And God answers: I am there with the afflicted. The God I know is with God's people, those in the image of God.
Because God is love.
Weil says only the afflicted know truth. All others lie.
And the hard truth is that God is there, too, for those who bring affliction on us. God judges the sufferers and the afflicters.
We are implicated in a fallen world. And each is offered God's love.
This is, for me, the beauty — the voice of God — in the Voice of First Nations. The Voice of my people.
It is the Voice of those afflicted. Those who know the worst, whose prayers can go unanswered. They know what faith truly is.
It is the voice of those who wait. Who endure.
Stan Grant is presenter of Q+A on Mondays at 9.35pm and the ABC's international affairs analyst.
