Another reason why the Sunday sabbath can be the hardest is because religion, which is supposed to be a consolation in our anxieties, can also be their source. The same God who saved Abraham from the Egyptians also asked him to sacrifice his son; the same Moses who led his people to the promised land was himself denied entry; the same Christ who raised the dead was also crucified to death; and the same God with the power to heal our loved ones also often chooses not to. In those moments, it’s harder to know which is the harsher idea: that there is no God and we’ve all just been fooling ourselves, or that (as CS Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed), this is who God really is, “the great vivesector,” and be no more deceived.

To be clear, I’m not saying those are the only two possibilities; only the first two that immediately present themselves when a loved one is dying. (Certainly both thoughts crossed my mind when my Mother died of cancer literally two days after I came home from my mission, but that is a topic for a forthcoming day).

This is certainly the theme of Sufjan Stevens’ “Casimir Pulaski Day,” from his 2005 magnum opus Illinois.

After coming down from the giddy-heights of “Chicago,” Sufjan throws cold-water on the proceedings, with this story-song about a close friend dying of bone cancer, the unmitigated havoc it wrecks upon their relationships and their faith, how every “Wednesday night, at the Bible study/we lift our hands, and pray over your body/but nothing ever happens.” Even if this hasn’t (yet) happened to you personally, the seeming randomness of tragedy, of who suffers and who doesn’t, can really weigh on you on a Sunday morning. (As Wilco once plaintively sang, “Nothing’s as random as God’s love…“) The injustice of the world is hard enough, without also adding the apparent injustice of God.

But again, if religion is often the source of our consternation, it is also our simultaneous consolation. And fellow Indie-darling Regina Spektor understood this, when she released “Laughing With,”^[1]Of which there was a great Kishi Bashi cover from just a year ago the lead single to her 2009 album Far.^[2]Although her 2003 album Soviet Kitsch is her true masterpiece

It is worth emphasizing that Spektor is the descendant of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants–who, as survivors of such unfathomable atrocities as the Holodomor and Jewish pogroms, fully understood what it was to feel God your last remaining support when literally all else fails. Nevertheless, in the chorus, Regina Spektor still acknowledges why so many are rightfully suspicious of religion–from the fundamentalists who “say he hates us” or to the charlatans saying “he’ll give you money/If you just pray the right way”–but at the end of the day, no one is dismissive of God when the plane starts shaking, or the cops call late at night, or the doctors call, or there’s war or famine or a hate-crime or what have you.^[3]The song was in fact heavily criticized by many Indie aficionados when it first debuted in 2009, who accused it of being a tone-deaf, reductionist caricature of atheist/agnostic complaints against … Continue reading

She makes no explanations, nor mounts any apologetics, for why God allows all this suffering to occur in the first place; she simply reminds us why so many need that consolation so badly in the first place. It’s why Sufjan Stevens kept attending those Bible studies even after his friend got bone cancer. It’s why I kept attending Church after my Mom passed.