Posted on: 21st August 2025

Kemi Badenoch read about Fritzl, who imprisoned and abused his daughter Elisabeth for 24 years. She noted that Elisabeth prayed for life from death, but got no timely help, while Kemi received positive answers to her ‘trivial’ prayers. ‘Like a candle being blown out’-  her faith in God went. (BBC news)

How to respond to this story? Do not argue about the ‘problem of evil’.  Rather, ask what prayer is, what it can be, in a dungeon experience like Elisabeth’s.

Or in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s.

In prison, he said, he was ‘like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath…weary and empty at praying…ready to say farewell to it all’ (poem, Who Am I?).   

We need or want things, trivial or vital, and so we ask God to give good gifts to us, his children (Luke 11,12). Prayer as asking for what we want is honest about our humanity. But prison and things like that mean we cannot have what we want or need. If our candle of faith is not to be snuffed out by the pressures of life, more is needed than an open supply line. Bonhoeffer gives a clue to this ‘more’ in his letter of 21 July 1944, where he talks of ‘taking the sufferings of God in the world seriously and sharing them in our lives’.

So we pray not to get ‘things’ but rather to be with God in all our life, in the world. God creates, gives, rescues, blesses – all that and more, pile the words, but include ‘suffers’ in the list. God suffers in all his ill-treated creatures, suffers ‘the contradiction of sinners’, God cares, sees things clearly, weeps. If prayer is coming close to God in heart and mind, it takes us into suffering. 'Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving’ (Poem, Christians and Pagans).

Sharing the sufferings of God means a bumpy drive, instability. God suffers all the negation that human evil and blindness, and destructive waste make. In little and in massive suffering, God suffers. Suffering may drive the thought of God and of prayer from our agenda. If, nevertheless, we pray, honestly, with our whole life meeting God in life, we will be drawn and commanded into the way of God’s goodness, and on that way, suffering cannot be avoided.

Sometimes the suffering is as devastating as ‘My God, why have you forsaken me/us/even yourself?’

There is hope. We are talking not just about the suffering of God, but about the suffering of God. Within the suffering, God is, and God is light in darkness, life against death, love battling hate without losing its character. Christ is Risen, and God always is, as he is in Jesus.

By Haddon Willmer