{"id":634,"date":"2009-10-18T19:20:54","date_gmt":"2009-10-18T23:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/?p=634"},"modified":"2009-10-18T20:54:39","modified_gmt":"2009-10-19T00:54:39","slug":"suffering-of-god-of-lauren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/archives\/634","title":{"rendered":"Suffering: of God, of Lauren"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is it Lauren’s hyperempathy that inspires the renaming of her father’s god? Without saying it outright, is she asking: Does my father’s god share the joys and suffer the pains of human beings like I<\/em> do? And if this god is filled with the same debilitating fear and misery that I feel – infinityfold – and human fear and misery is not alleviated or worse, increases, doesn’t this mean that this god is powerless? Unable to help us from his perch in “heaven, wherever,” (as Lauren calls, dismissively, Keith’s resting place)?<\/p>\n

What’s a hyperempathic girl to do? Retreat to an inward space like a journal. Chronicle the community’s suffering. Name a new god. The leap sounds extreme but aren’t the stakes (or walls, if you will) high enough to warrant such a move? We write about our obsessions; Lauren’s primary obsession is human suffering, beginning with her own community’s. Is Earthseed born because she believes that their suffering is too great for their god to be the almighty god? In any case, I think that Lauren’s frustration with her father’s god overlaps with her doubts about his leadership. A parallel structure speaking to her community’s practical needs: their suffering is too great for their\u00a0leader<\/em> to be the almighty\u00a0leader<\/em> and thus…what? At one point Lauren says “I believe in something that I think my dying, denying, backward-looking people need.” What is this belief? Is it indirectly driven by her power to share grief? Some kind of anything-you-can-feel-I-can-feel-more-of elitism?<\/p>\n

When she calls for change in her confrontation with Joanne, first she appeals to the facts of their community: “Amy [Dunn] was the first of us to be killed like that. She won’t be the last.” Global facts come next: “There’s cholera…there’s too many poor people…You know that drug that makes people want to set fires?…Tornadoes are smashing the hell out of…there’s a blizzard freezing the…Measles!” The outward empathy that she’s able to feel for strangers near and abroad without her unique, physical experience is powerful alone.\u00a0Eventually, however, the conversation with Joanne moves to talk of a generational conflict. Lauren pinpoints delusion as the problem. Donner is “a symbol of the past for us to hold on to as we’re pushed into a future…having him there make people feel that the country will get through these bad times and back to normal.” She accuses her community’s adults of sharing this same delusion. Her father “is the best person [she knows] but even he has his blind spots.” The paradox here is that we know that Lauren has a self-proclaimed “crazy, deep-rooted delusion.” Isn’t there something fishy about pinning the heart of her own syndrome to the reason why her community is a wreck? Is Lauren’s suffering driving her frantic need for change? Survivors’ guilt? She has been to hell and back, felt an animal’s “life flare go out and [she] was still alive.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is it Lauren’s hyperempathy that inspires the renaming of her father’s god? Without saying it outright, is she asking: Does my father’s god share the joys and suffer the pains of human beings like I do? And if this god is filled with the same debilitating fear and misery that I feel – infinityfold –… Continue reading Suffering: of God, of Lauren<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":636,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions\/636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}