Forsakenness as Revelation: Uncertainty at the Heart of God

Layman Pascal reframes Christ's cry of dereliction — 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' — as a mythological event of transfiguration rather than a theological problem requiring resolution. In this reading, Christ is not merely abandoned; he is undergoing a transformation in his relationship to the Divine itself. The covenantal God of certainty, promise, and stable ground dissolves in the moment of forsakenness. Pascal's critical move is to argue that this dissolution reveals God's deepest nature: the question mark is not a deficiency in our understanding of an exclamation mark but the authentic character of the Divine as irreducibly open, uncertain, and generative. Worship thus shifts from orientation toward a being of perfect certainty to participation in a ground of being that is itself questioning.

The non-dual structure of the insight is precise: disconnection is simultaneously the site of connection; the separator is the connector. The grief of forsakenness, held without premature resolution, becomes the locus where a deeper mode of participation emerges — one that does not depend on covenantal guarantees but inhabits the open texture of reality itself.

Bruce Alderman deepens this trajectory by identifying structural isomorphism between Christ's sacrifice and the Tibetan shamanic practice of Chöd, in which the practitioner offers their dismembered body to all beings. Both enact the same sacrificial logic: dissolution of bounded identity as the mechanism of expanded participation. Alderman further suggests that practices like Tonglen, extended to planetary scale, share this movement — with grief, not merely gratitude, serving as the medium through which individual identity opens into the broader living sphere.