Many people without options are amazingly able to wring blessings from their wretched experiences, and I admire this. But if God authors wretched experiences so that God might subsequently be glorified by the great results achieved by suffering submissive servants, then that’s definitely Someone I don’t want to spend any time (let alone eternity) with.

Zita was a household slave. She believed that hard labor “is enjoined all men [and, apparently, women, too] as a punishment of sin, and as a remedy for the spiritual disorder of their souls”–and so, Butler tells us, Zita rejoiced in her life of menial servitude. She engaged in what she regarded as “the necessity of employing herself in penitential labour and of living in a perpetual conformity and submission of her will to others.” Uggh.

Zita adhered to a process that many conservative evangelicals often label “discipleship”–the total dismantling of one’s will, of one’s sense of justice (and native anger in the face of its violation), and of one’s dignity, only to replace this native self with a spirit of subservience and the belief that, as my mother used to tell me and my brother, “you should be glad you don’t get what you deserve!” Zita believed that her endless hours of hard work, her beatings, and her mistreatments were sent by God and, given her sinfulness, were fully merited. And Zita was fully convinced of this Divine way of “blessing” sinners by the age of 12, at which point was sent off to servitude by her pious(?!)-but-poor mother.

There is a fine but exceedingly bright line between (1) believing that good can come from any situation, no matter how miserable, and that new life and hope can spring from whatever that life throws at you, and (2) believing that all bad situations one encounters are part of God’s plan to teach you a lesson. In the former situation, God is understood as an irrepressible life force that cannot be stymied–the life force of the flower that grows out of a pile of shit in the midst of rubble. In the second, God is a sadist (whose “righteousness” is not to be questioned) with an inexhaustible supply of torturous, tortuous means of teaching harsh lessons to sinful beings–who will either learn submission (as St. Zita did) or who will spend eternity in a lake of sulfurous fire.

With Whom would YOU want to spend eternity?! Or even one afternoon?