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Where is God when your loved one gets cancer? The easy answers are all wrong.
With or Without Me is an unsparing and eloquent critique of religion. Yet Esther Maria Magnis’s frustration is merely the beginning of a tortuous journey toward faith – one punctuated by personal losses retold with bluntness and immediacy. “If God is love,” she writes, “then it’s a kind of love I do not understand.” She dares to believe anyway, although her questioning won’t let up. She fiercely dismantles both the clichés she’s heard in church and the endless philosophizing of her parents’ generation.
Magnis knows believing in God is anything but easy. Because he allows people to suffer. Because he’s invisible. And silent. “I think we miss God,” she writes. “I would never want to persuade anyone or put myself above atheists. I know there are good reasons not to believe. But sometimes I think most people are just sad that he’s not there.”
With or Without Me is a book for everyone – believer or unbeliever, Christian or atheist – who refuses to surrender to the idea that there are easy answers to the big questions in life.
This is a powerful memoir. No easy answers. Hard painful realities of life. Unvarnished and raw at times. Believing can be challenging. But for the author, not believing is even harder. In the end, she faced the reality that despite all the hard stuff, at the bottom of reality, “God is.”
This is a memoir of one woman's wrestling with the reality or unreality of God. Lots of philosophical questions that she struggled with in relation to the Lord and how He works. Is He there or is He not? Can He be there stronger when He is silent and how does our hearts affect all of this? Life is pain and no one gets out alive. All have suffered or will suffer. The question is, will you suffer alone or will you allow the one who suffered death for you, accompany you? This is a thought provoking book. It really makes me feel for all of the people in the world who do not know Jesus Christ and His loving embrace. The reality is that most of us will have to be broken before He can gain entrance into our hearts. I know I did.
How do we find meaning and purpose in our earthly lives when we know they will end, and hold onto faith when God seems silent in our suffering and Christians around us have no words to help. These are not a new questions, but reasoned theodicy has failed to answer them. Like the great Russian novelists before her, Magnis turns to experience for answers. Rather than trying to rationalise her suffering by abstracting herself outside it and fumbling for reasoned theological answers, she instead mines her experience of living through that suffering to glean meaning. The result is a harrowing but consuming read that is inherently empirical. With or Without Me does not attempt to generalise the author’s experience into a unified theology or narrative, but instead presents an unglossed account of one person’s path through suffering and doubt. This book could well serve those struggling with doubt or suffering who are not inclined to read systematic philosophical or theological texts.
I had a visceral reaction to With or Without Me, scared at times to continue reading as it awakened emotions from similar experiences of my own. Ultimately, common experiences unite us, and this memoir provides deep psychological insight into an inquisitive mind which Death smacked down early in life and which was not quite sure how to keep living.
The hard-edged experiences of her suffering move Esther Maria Magnis to truths that open her to God as ultimate Truth but also as mystery, whose voice out of the storm upends Job’s complaints. Magnis does not put herself above those of other beliefs or no belief. Her story is not an argument but an extraordinary personal story of both terror and beauty shared with us as we also travel.
Godandthee got me like Martin Bubers I/Thou. I got as surprise in mail because I signed up as a Member and did not intend to read. Scanned most of it extracting kernels until Grandmas slurring end of the psalm gave the word Godandthee. In my professional life as a data analyst I sometimes say that if you squint at a graph of the data you see something more relevant than otherwise can be seen. I/Thou and Godandthee feel like that. The story of her brother became something far more than the afterward I at first thought it was - more of a capstone. So, yes, please read it and like praying it will come to you because it is already there waiting. Martin
"With or Without Me" by Esther Maria Magnis is an unsparingly eloquent critique of religion, the tortuous start of a deep personal journey towards unconditional faith in God, punctuated at every turn by heart-wrenching personal losses. Esther dares to believe in God, despite her own persistent questions that demand answers. She bravely dares to launch out on her own, battling all odds. Esther refuses to believe that there must always be clear-cut answers to the baffling questions of life. She boldly declares how extremely disastrous and catastrophic it is to not believe in God. Esther describes how she experienced the fundamental reality of God in such a concrete, dense, intense way, and the exhilarating sense of redemption that came along with it. Her own faith is deeply strengthened through the beautiful, enlightening faith of her brother, Johannes. This is an illuminating book that makes one think about the utmost importance of believing in God. It is either God or nothing, in a world that defies God at every turn.
