God of Absence

Once, years ago, I went to church to talk to a nun about my crumbling belief. She immediately named something that I hadn't admitted before, as I'd thought of my doubt as being an intellectual struggle with reactionary Christian politics and with irrational conclusions drawn from the absence of evidence. "You think God has abandoned you," she said.

Something that's always resonated with me is Harold Bloom's idiosyncratic reading of the Yahwist God as canonically unreliable. He interprets the famous line from Exodus "I Am That I Am" as meaning something like "I Will Be Present Whenever and Wherever I Choose to be Present," which, as Bloom says, "implies its terrifying corollary: I will be absent whenever I choose to be absent." It's an image of God suggesting an impulsive character who asks for absolute adoration at one moment, and then demands that you be okay with him not delivering on what he promised. Still, he expects absolute trust in his decreasingly credible assertions, a lifelong addict flabbergasted when his kids stop believing he'll ever get sober.

Harold Bloom separates the unreliable God from the later character of God the Father, but it's not hard to connect these two conceptions. The absent and temperamental father is an archetypal character probably as resonant in the Bronze Age as it is today: Odysseus, Lear, Pap Finn, Rick Sanchez. Maybe the absent father character is as old as, and is implied by, patriarchy. If your societal position, military and financial stability, and religious legitimacy depend on your father, what does it mean if he might walk away? Doesn't it suggest a terrifying fragility woven into the fabric of that world?

Who says the Biblical God wasn't meant to be a bad father? Weren't YHWH and El, perhaps, initially gods of clouds and storms? How predictable would you expect them to be?

God the Father, according to right-wing sects of each Abrahamic religion, is always promising his children land. It's hard to admit, as sons from Hamlet to Star-Lord to Jesus have realized (with dawning horror), that maybe your father's promises weren't his to make to begin with. 

If the story of God were meant to be the story of abandonment more than the story of covenant and redemption, if the story of religion was written by our ancestors to convey the unreliability of the second coming, what were they saying about the nature of paradise?