One of the most difficult questions posed by religions concerns the relationship between God and evil. If God is the creator, omnipotent, perfect and infinitely loving, how can we account for a world in which pain, illness, violence, loss, fear and death exist?

There are many answers. In the major monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), the perfection and goodness of God are beyond question, so the origin of evil must be sought elsewhere: in human freedom, sin, the Fall, the devil, or reasons that human beings are unable to comprehend. Various Gnostic conceptions approach the problem differently: this world was not created by the supreme God, who remains perfect and good, but by an inferior creator, sometimes called the Demiurge, who may be conceived as ignorant, imperfect, hostile or perverse.

The evil and imperfection of the world therefore do not compromise the perfection of the supreme God precisely because He did not create it. A similar conception can be found in *A Course in Miracles*: God did not create this world and did not create the physical body; the world of separation belongs to the error of the mind, the body is part of this condition, and the path consists in awakening from separation. In both cases, therefore, the perfection of God remains intact: a world marked by suffering, separation and death cannot be His creation.

In this regard, FS recounts an experience that occurred during a period of profound suffering, when he felt utterly unable to establish any relationship with God. He prayed, pleaded and asked for an answer, but encountered above all silence, while anything that might have appeared to be an answer could always be interpreted as an illusion, a thought or a construction of his own mind. At a certain point, he decided to withdraw and not to move from where he was until he had received an answer. He continued to address God, asking why He would not make Himself heard, why He remained inaccessible despite his prayers, and what FS needed to do, change or purify in order finally to encounter Him. He continued to insist without receiving anything, until at a certain point he perceived a very clear voice within himself.

FS does not claim that this voice came from God: it could have been his own voice, a psychological elaboration, imagination, a reflection produced by the situation, or something whose origin could not be determined. Moreover, what he perceived was extremely brief, perhaps only a few words or something even less definable, of which he retains no precise verbatim formulation. The text that follows is therefore not a transcription of what the voice said to him, but a later attempt to put into words the meaning that FS perceived in that instant:

‘I cannot communicate with you as long as you continue not to recognise me. You seek me as a perfect being, infinitely good and incapable of making mistakes, while I am continually present in your experience, and what you experience includes pain, evil and imperfection, as well as moments of joy which nevertheless coexist with suffering. As long as you continue to believe that I am perfect and cannot make mistakes, you will not be able to know me and I will not be able to reveal myself to you, because you have expectations of me that I do not fulfil. I am not perfect. I made a mistake. I made a grave mistake. I did not do so intentionally, but my creation produced this world and the suffering it contains, and I take full responsibility for it. What offends me most is the attempt to justify evil while continuing to regard me as perfect and attributing the blame to creatures, the devil or someone else. Responsibility for creation is first and foremost mine. I cannot resign from what I have created, but I can acknowledge the mistake. Let us work together to transform this world. To do so, however, you must allow me to be what I am and stop demanding that I be the perfect God you were taught to expect.’

Among the many experiences of various kinds that FS has had in different contexts, this was perhaps the one that opened his heart most profoundly. This does not mean that he believes that the voice really came from God or that God is imperfect: it could have been entirely an experience produced by his own mind, a symbolic construction or an illusion.

And yet FS wishes to preserve this possibility, because precisely what might have appeared scandalous produced the opposite effect in him: that God who admitted having made a mistake suddenly seemed close to him. His own imperfection no longer appeared to be something belonging exclusively to the creature in the presence of an immaculate creator, and it became conceivable that there could be a relationship in which creator and creature could acknowledge together an imperfect condition and work together to transform it.

Only at this point does a possibility emerge that the previous conceptions did not contemplate: that God exists, created this world and made a mistake. Perfection might then not be an original condition, but something still to be realised, including through cooperation between creator and creatures. This remains only one possibility among others: God might be perfect, imperfect or non-existent; an atheistic perspective excludes a creator, while non-theistic traditions such as Buddhism address suffering and liberation without presupposing God. FS is therefore not proposing a new theology of an imperfect God, but preserving this possibility without turning it into a belief.

The most intense aspect of the experience concerned confession and absolution. In the usual religious relationship, it is the human being who confesses their sins to God and asks to be absolved; in FS’s experience, the reverse occurred, because it was ‘God’ who first confessed His own mistake and took responsibility for it. It was precisely this reversal that produced in FS what no assertion of divine perfection had ever managed to produce: ‘When God confessed His “sin”, I finally felt absolved. My imperfection no longer appeared to be something I had added to an originally perfect creation while the Creator remained immaculate. If He too could have made a mistake, then I could finally feel a resemblance between us, and we could truly work together. For the first time, I really felt like a son of God; before that, I had felt only like a “bastard”.’