The Child in us wants a God who is ‘The Rescuer’, as the existentialist Irvin Yalom calls this deity.
The Rescuing God is, in so far as it has any validity, part of salvation. There is a divine Light that can rescue us from human – and demonic infested – ‘darkness.’
However, many people who lose the Rescuer lose all faith in God as a result, without realising there is another side of this.
Losing the Rescuer is necessary to switch from seeking Salvation for oneself, and those close to one, to immersing in the Redemption that will include all, both those close to us and those remote from us, those who are friends and those who are enemies. Only redeeming includes all. Salvation is always dualistic, in whatever form it is articulated, Jewish ‘saved versus damned’, Buddhist ‘enlightened versus ignorant’, Greek ‘whole versus fragmented.’ Saving does not have the means, the spiritual clout, to save all, even if it is dedicated to this in some kindly desire to extend itself infinitely. It will always end up as some can be saved, most cannot be saved.
This is why the Rescuer God must go..
The Rescuer God is destroyed by the Daemonic God.
Losing God as any kind of personal Rescuer is the first wound of the Daemonic.
Many people at this point lose all faith in any kind of ‘personal’, and especially ‘loving’, God, and go no farther.
This is a pity..
Losing any Rescuer God is the first step on the path that leads to the Daemonic God.
If people stayed with the loss of the Rescuer God, however devastating, instead of bailing out on all and any God that has a claim on their personhood and their love, they would find this the moment they were initiated into the existence pain that is black and inexplicable. This is where the real God begins, and a false god is left behind.
This wound of the Daemonic is where the path of redemption begins.
Stay with the loss of God as a Rescuer to find the God who is a Redeemer– of all.
This God of humanity’s heartbreak asks us to put the Child away, to let the Child in us die, so that we can reground our heartbreak in the heartbreak of all of humanity.
This is when we join the human tragedy.
This is when different tears fall.
This is when Redemption does not rescue anything we wanted rescued, but starts to move through everything differently— and we go with it..