How to Pray When You're Pissed at God

No one escapes pain, and loss is inevitable.

I first discovered this personally when I watched my baby brother die from a genetic defect that was "incompatible with life." Though whole on the outside, his inner workings were irreparably different from what people need to survive. I was 8 years old, wide-eyed, and confused. I hope that his 3-day-old suffering was small. But I know that our family's was great. The helplessness, resignation, and wrongness of that loss hurt.

Afterwards, I saw from my second-grade perspective the various responses of our church to my family's difficult time. We were new to the faith. I watched my parents mourn and receive comfort from people that we worshipped with on Sundays. Some of them were wonderful, silent. They suffered with us. Others had no clue what to do, other than share awkward platitudes or even trying to change the subject to something other than the little bundle lying just out of sight.

Since then, I've been around plenty of premature funerals, at plenty of hospital beds where the morphine wasn't cutting it, or was cutting it too well. Across plenty of coffee tables from close friends one Americano away from breaking down. I've seen and heard the myriad Christian responses for when life hurts. Many were wonderful. But many others were totally inadequate to plumb the depths with people in the valleys of shadow.

Lost language

Sometimes I wonder if our Christian subculture has lost the ability to reckon with suffering. You'd be hard pressed to find any indication in most Christian media that we suffer at all. The few resources dedicated to the topic of suffering or anger towards God are either for a crowd that already knows the word "theodicy," or else so sugar-coated with sweet nuggets of how to get over your grief and on with your life that the pain and richness of suffering all but disappears. Where is the anger? The deep grief? The sense of having gazed into the abyss without any indication that God even cared about what was bumping around down there? We seem to want to excuse God even at the moments when our every instinct is to blame him.

It's polite, but hollow.

The Christian story is unflinching in its treatment of suffering. It looks the full horrors of the human experience in the eye—and refuses to turn away. It finds life and joy in the middle of it all. Our doctrine is rich with holy contradictions of blood and bandages, deaths and resurrections, and a hundred inexplicable moments of hope right when all seems lost. We have holy, angry, righteous indignation against the world's systems of abuse and oppression. And, of course, our spiritual ancestors often railed against God.

So when did we forget our rich, raging heritage?

Raging and reverent

AM talk radio is a bit like Nazareth. Can anything good come out of it? Yes, if How to Pray when You're Pissed at God (Random House, 2013) is any indication.

Ian Punnett isn't your stereotypical prayer guru. His day job is as a talk radio host/ rock station DJ, including on the (in)famous and bizarre Coast to Coast AM show, which I freely admit to listening to, anytime I have to drive creepy, isolated roads at night. When I saw his bio I expected a book that was short on prayer and long on pissed. I was wrong.

Punnett is an Episcopal deacon with a M.Div. and extensive experience as a hospital chaplain. That experience of dealing with the harsh questions of suffering comes through. How to Pray is an honest, sensitive, and surprisingly reverent book. It's big-hearted and gritty. It manages to capture a bit of the deep resignation and quiet closeness to God that I've felt in my own experiences of loss and anger. Punnett writes for those pulled to prayer even when the only words that seem to come are expletives, and he does it well.

He accompanies his own stories of suffering and tough pastoral ministry with a liturgy of (mostly) righteous anger. By turns, it's funny, biting, and profound. For all his surface irreverence,he manages to pull off a book that's deeply holy, genuinely pastoral, and ok with not having all the answers to the ancient question of what the hell was that, God? That's not an easy feat.

His written prayers range from the humorous ("An Angry Prayer for Those Who Are Cut Off in Traffic") to the quietly sensitive, ("An Angry Prayer for Someone Suffering From Depression During the Holidays"), to the furious and even heart-wrenching ("An Angry Prayer for the Abusers of Children"). Punnett uses Psalm-like language to cut deep to the heart of multiple agonies: the cold anger, the hot rage, the seething bitterness, the apathetic, unfeeling numbness of grief and hurt and wounding that we seem to receive from the hand of God.

Hope is here, too, but it is mostly the hope of the suffering Psalms, a hope tenuously tied to a God currently conspicuous only in his absence. Yet, in tying the specifics of modern suffering to their biblical counterparts, a sacred light is cast on familiar injustices and inconveniences in unexpected, refreshing ways.

This is a book on suffering, prayer, hope, despair, and the difficulties of lived Christianity. Punnett does what only a talk radio host and a liturgical deacon could—offer a litany of prayer that heals even as it presses on our bruises, with a witty, in-your-face aside and a sardonic, gracious smile.

And in doing so, he's given a rare gift to the church and to our culture.

Why do we struggle to express the dark feelings of lived faith? I really can't say. Books like Punnett's—honest and insightful, reverent, and raging at the same time—are rare. It would be hard to imagine this book (a Random House title) coming from the catalog of a mainstream Christian publishing house. Yet that's exactly where it should be.

Maybe we are so slow to rage at God because we fear that our faith cannot sustain anger towards its object. Maybe we're afraid that when the pinch comes, we won't be able to reconcile our mourning with Christianity's deep joy. Are we scared to utter the words "I think that God did this to me?" Are we scared to tell him that? To vent feelings of accusation? Maybe we've forgotten the dark mystery of Job, who, after suffering, angry and without divine explanation, receives no more than a "who are you?" in response.

Or worse, maybe we've remembered that story.

Hope and anger

It is true that we do not grieve like those who have no hope. Neither do we rage like those who have no justice, suffer like those who find no healing, or wander like those who have no path. But it's my opinion that we need to rediscover the holy disciplines of angry prayer during life's dark seasons. Our souls cry for it. Our anger is not the opposite of hope; it actually enables it.

Punnett's brief book prompts me to connect my prayer to how I feel, without losing sight of the true nature of the Christian story.

Every April, on my brother's death-day, I feel a little twist of the now familiar wrongness of death and suffering. Every time I read the news or sit with a friend experiencing the fallout of the Fall, I remember the phrase that theologian T.F. Torrance repeated from the early Fathers, "the unassumed is the unhealed." In taking on our entire humanity, from our deepest joys to our most heinous crimes, Christ redeemed it. He called it his own, and brought it into his kingdom. Redeemed it all—the sorrow, the hurt, and the pissed-ness. That is a beautiful mystery that I do not understand. But I sure believe it.

And I also believe that embracing that difficult doctrine inevitably means that we will echo Jesus—"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"—as we hang on the crosses we have taken up to follow him.

The Resurrection can redeem that. But it cannot make it easier.

Paul Pastor is the online editor for Leadership Journal.