It is not that we find God and then realize he created us from nothing. Rather, it is only in finding our own nothingness and embracing it that we realize God exists. For only an encounter with our nothingness takes us far enough outside our world for us to realized there is a giver of being who does not belong to it. One finds God by dying. And what dies last and most reluctantly is our longing to be important, to be beings in our right, our not wanting to shrink, in mortifying embarrassment, in acknowledging one's own nothingness, one discovers for the first time one's true and utter unworthiness. And only someone suffering, in all its mortifying anguish, that sense of unworthiness, of not deserving to exist, is in a position to know what it means to be loved into being by God. For it is precisely in our nothingness, and nowhere else, that God loves us. To be loved, we said, is to be wounded, and no love hurts more, pierces more deeply than the kind we are completely undeserving to receive.
Jerome Miller in
The Way of Suffering: a geography of crisis, page 47.
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