Something else for Rue and honesty
Submitted by Dirk Gently on September 24 1999 at 08:30:23
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This column will appear on Saturday in The Dallas Morning News. I thought it was a very coherent treatment of the questions Rue and honesty have raised below. Dirk * * * Thinking about the Fort Worth Tragedy by Frederica Mathewes-Green It was like a little sharp knifepoint, reading the ages of the victims: this one 14, that one 14, this one 14 as well, with a worn stuffed animal near her head in the coffin. My own children have recently passed that age, and my routine worries don't have to include that any more, at least; whatever injuries life may deal them will not attack bodies still tender and budding. Suffering is always outrageous, but even more so when it attacks vulnerable childhood. It's enough to make some people lose their faith. I thought of this one Sunday morning not long ago as my son, Stephen, chanted the words of the 38th Psalm. "My wounds stink and are corrupt...There is no soundness in my flesh. I am feeble and sore broken...My heart panteth, my strength faileth me." Oh, not my son, Lord, please, let it never be my son, I silently prayed. But it was somebody's child who wrote this. It has to be somebody it happens to. "As for the light of mine eyes, it is also gone from me. My lovers and friends stand aloof from my sore...I am ready to halt, and my sorrow is continually before me." Oh Lord, not my son, please. This is the pain of being a parent, knowing that your child could be hurt someday, crying out words like these, and you would not be able to fix it. It's the big stupid, stupid prize question of all spiritual life, how can bad things happen to good people, and no matter how many words are poured over it the problem remains, mocking us: good people still get clobbered by bad things. This, finally, is the problem. We don't want so much to know *why* it happens as to know how to stop it from happening, as if understanding what triggers such catastrophe might help us avoid it. Our quest is for prevention, yet the cruel centuries keep rolling and no one's yet found a way to prevent it. The term for this, the "problem of evil," is "theodicy" and the alternatives have been cleverly summarized: "Either God is God and he is not good, or God is good and he is not God." That is, either God is not all-loving in the way we think, and tolerates our pain because his goals don't require our happiness--or God suffers with us helplessly but is unable to stop our suffering, is not all-powerful. Neither alternative works. A God who is not good would violate the definition, and violate what we know of his overwhelming goodness running through most of our lives. A God who is not all-powerful would likewise void the meaning of the word. The retired Episcopal bishop of South Carolina, Fitzsimmons Allison, explained that accepting this confounding mystery is the only way to resolve it: "I've got the ‘I don't know' theodicy. God is God, and God is good, and I don't know." A number of different suggestions have been made through the ages to work out the dilemma. Maybe it is the devil wreaking his anger on the faithful. Maybe it is random effects from the initial fall of Adam and Eve, which sent a wave of disorder rolling obliviously forward through time. Maybe God won't stop bad people from hurting others, because then he'd have to stop everyone from doing even small bad things, and human history would become mere puppetry. Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov recounts hearing this discussion between two monks: "I cannot understand why the Lord does not grant peace to the world even if only a single person implored Him to do so." "And how could there be complete peace in the world if but a single malicious man remained?" A world of free creatures requires the possibility that they will freely choose evil. Since the flood of Noah, God has declined to fix things by wiping out all the troublemakers. The only solution that remains is for each of us to realize that we are ourselves junior troublemakers to one extent or another, and do our part to clean up our own corners. This is why Jesus was always telling people to repent. He gave no other explanation of suffering. When an atrocity was reported to him—worshipers murdered in the Temple itself--he rejected the idea that they suffered this because they were worse sinners than anyone else. Yet he concluded, "Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish." This is a hard word, one that doesn't get preached on very often, nor written up in curly script on Bible refrigerator magnets. We keep asking why, but we don't need to know why something happened; we can't use that knowledge to go back in time and stop it. And the terrifying truth is that we can't gather enough clues to know how to prevent it happening next time. Theodicy nettles us, but the bottom line is that it's irrelevant. The only useful question in such a time is not, "Why?" but "What next?" What should I do next? What should be my response to this ugly event? How can I bring the best out of it? How can God bring Resurrection out of it? That is, of course, what he did when his own Son was bleeding and crying out in agony. He did not prevent the suffering and did not cut it short, but he completed it with Resurrection. If this is true, it changes everything; if it is not true, Christians are pathetic fools, because it is on this that we have staked all our hopes. "If Christ is not raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins... If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied" (I Corinthians 15:17, 19). So, there you are. All we can do is persevere and trust, that if Jesus was raised we too will be raised, and all our suffering will be made right. In light of this we forgive those who hurt us; in light of this we live at peace. Stephen concludes the psalm, repeating three times a cry of faith that I hope he would make at such an awful time: "Forsake me not, O Lord: O my God, be not far from me. Make haste to help me, O Lord of my salvation." * * * Frederica Mathewes-Green is the author of "At the Corner of East and Now". Her web site is www.frederica.com. |