Healing from Poverty Trauma: Insights from Alma 32
Bad theology I'm currently taking apart in my head: that suffering has a purpose to teach lessons, and if you don't learn them the first time, God will make sure you learn it by making you repeat the experiences to teach the lesson.
Especially prominent as it relates to patience. "God decided I needed to learn patience, so He gave me trials." And if you don't learn the requisite patience the first time, you'll have to try again. Usually without your consent.
What does this say about God? That he treats it learning like a checklist item, and our suffering and failures are immaterial as long as the outcome is achieved. I don't believe that. But what is the alternative? A God who is hands off, that all suffering is random, that there is no meaning or intentionally behind any of it, and he does just enough to keep my boat from sinking? I don't know if I believe that either.
So what is God's actual relationship like to our struggles? What makes sense and is consistent with what my experience has been?
From what I've seen, I'm a bag of water and trauma responses, and God is a comforting force that tries so hard to help me, and I'm often powerless to let him. I can't get anything done until I'm calm. Not spiritually or secularly. I know that about myself. So regardless of the nature of how things are "supposed" to work, this is true for me. This is the nature of being neurodivergent. Nothing works as it ideally should. Religion is no different.
But the idea that God would or could help me more if everything about the way my brain functions didn't fall so often into rage and sadness seems unjust to its very core, ways that can't be described as holy. Because I've been hurt so badly in this life, God is less capable of helping me? Surely not.
Where I have landed, after almost three bone crushing years of living with constant anxiety that my lack of employment was going to land us on the street, is that God is the only thing in my life in my corner, keeping things from getting worse. Is that enough?
I'm not so naive, or enough of a mystic, anymore to believe that faith is something I can use inexplicably to keep bad things from happening to me. But I'm not so nihilistic to believe that faith is powerless and pointless either.
Theologically, where does that leave me?
I think what matters more than the source of the suffering, whether it's chosen by God or not, or chosen by humans around me or not, I have a choice in how I respond to it.
The power is mine and God will magnify my power through my choice to ask for help. Agency is Mormonism's answer to this. We will have as much help as we reach out and choose to have, in whatever circumstance we are, from God and from the community itself. We can shape the struggle through our choices.
I spent time in Alma 32 with this one and had my moment of clarity at verses 14-16 once again. (These verses are the reason I got baptized.) Poverty and prejudice happened to those people. But their choice to reject it was so powerful, no restriction placed upon them by people could stop them. God made a way for them where people had decided there would be no way. And it was in response to the humility they chose, in spite of their circumstances.
They held the power because of the choices they made. Agency truly gives us mastery over our own circumstances. God cannot be withheld from the humble seeker of truth, no matter what their problem is. I think that's where I'm landing.
