God Can Handle It: Part 2

Many of you identified with the post from yesterday about lament and being angry at God when we need to be.  Since the post seemed thought provoking, and it was helpful for me to meditate on it, I decided to continue to write on the topic periodically.  It may turn into a "mini-series" and it may not.

In Barbara Brown Taylor's most recent book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, she discusses the phenomenon of believing that having dark and intense emotions equates with lack of faith:

If you have ever spent time in the company of the dark emotions, you too may have received subtle messages from friends and strangers alike that you were supposed to handle them and move on sooner instead of later.

Some of us have even gotten the message that if we cannot do this on schedule, we may not have enough faith in God.  If we had enough, we would be able to banish the dark angels from our beds, replacing them with the light angels of belief, trust, and praise.  Greenspan calls this "spiritual bypassing" - - using religion to dodge the dark emotions instead of letting it lead us to embrace those dark angels as the best, most demanding spiritual teachers we may ever know.