I once dated a Christian girl who lost her Chapstick.
She had recently served as a pilot in the African mission field — super serious about Bible, church, etc. — I was relatively new to her world. One hot summer day, paddling along a Texas river with some friends, she found her lost Chapstick rolling around in the back of our canoe. She picked it up, popped off the lid, and said a quick “Thank you, Jesus,” while she moisturized herself.
As someone raised Catholic, I was annoyed by this, as I was with many other aspects of such a strange, new religion. If God helped her find her Chapstick, why did he allow her to lose it in the first place? I was sure that Jesus had nothing to do with this and only marginally cared about whether or not her lips were dry.
But it wasn’t long before I too started thanking Jesus whenever good things happened. Shortly after the Chapstick incident, I moved into a large house, made some great friends, launched into the next step of my aviation career, dove head-first into the life of a local church, and got super serious with Chapstick girl. My life was amazing. Every time something good came my way — even the smallest thing — I saw Jesus in it, manipulating the cosmic cogs in such a way as to cause a blessing or two to fall in my lap. I was special to him, allegedly, and could expect many great things to come.
Things weren’t so simple when bad things happened, like when Chapstick girl started a back-door romance with a fellow pilot and didn’t tell me about it. Did Jesus cause that too? Was I being punished? Was there something I was supposed to learn? A hidden blessing maybe?
Super-serious Christians throughout history have believed that nothing happens randomly. God controls everything and has a plan in his mind for the tiniest insect. Along with this goes the idea that God has to be good. If he’s not, and has his hands on all the buttons, we’re screwed.
So, when good things happen, we say, “Thank you, Jesus.” When bad things happen, we do all kinds of gymnastics to try and fit our bad moments into the meta narrative of God’s goodness.
That’s a bit easier for contemporary American Christianity than it is for those parts of the world that see death, loss, and suffering on a regular basis. The chances that a local militia, for example, is going to come crashing through my front door with automatic weapons and kick me out of my home are slim at the moment. If that did happen, I’d be scratching my head, trying to figure out how God could let that happen.
And yet there are people in those parts of the world who still worship God, calling him “good” nearly as often as we do. Why? Do they truly believe or are they simply hanging on to a delusion because it eases their suffering on some level?
Many others, on the eve of something horrible, will completely bail from whatever religion they previously held. Who could blame them?
If you’re a Christian, I’m not inviting you to do the same, but if you believe that God exists, you have to be honest about the reality of suffering; not the I-lost-my-Chapstick, or I-caught-my-girlfriend-making-out-with-Jaques-behind-the-hangar kind of suffering, but the gut-wrenching horrors of this world.
Would you still believe if your kids were kidnapped, shipped off to who-knows-where, never to be seen again? Things like that happen all the time, ungoverned by who’s Christian and who’s not.
Spare me the apologist loaded with proofs as to why God does what he does, allowing no tension, no room for mystery. Sure, you could deduce, as C.S. Lewis did, that God allows suffering because it forces us to come to grips with our need for him, or that suffering makes us stronger, or builds character. You could say, as this blogger has so many times, that suffering drives human intimacy — arguably God’s highest priority — like nothing else.
But, as my wife has asked many times, why didn’t God simply make a world that doesn’t require suffering? He can do anything he wants, why not achieve his goals in a more peaceful, comfortable way?
I also don’t want to hear how suffering is proof that God doesn’t exist. My atheist friends say that the universe created itself and is “evolving,” i.e., moving in a trajectory of constant improvement. If that were true, human suffering would be on some trajectory away from where it’s always been.
It’s not.
Regular, unthinkable suffering is not going anywhere.
And so, the average, every day Chapstick Christian like myself is forced to reconcile our suffering world with an all-powerful God who must be good.
But we don’t struggle with this because there’s some lack of data. We struggle because we can’t embrace a simple fact about God: by definition, if he exists, he’d do things that don’t make sense. By further definition, he would, on occasion, do things that seem outright unjust.
His understanding of the universe significantly outstrips ours, how can everything he does make sense, or seem righteous?
When he makes things like earth and sky, or when he takes on the form of a human to set us straight on what God is really like, or when new people are made, some will say, “thank you, Jesus.” Others will say that’s what a good, all-powerful God is supposed to do. A great many others will parse these with skilled scientific analyses. No miracles here.
When a tsunami wipes out everyone on the coast, some will say a very Christian “c’est la Dieu.” Others will say “I don’t understand.” A great many others will include this in the mounting list of evidence supporting the idea that God can’t possibly exist.
When we indict God for the parts of our world that don’t add up (understandable as that is), we’re making a statement about our ability to grasp the universe’s realities. A good God who allows suffering cannot exist; those two things don’t fit within the limitations of our understanding, so we set out to find something that does, forgetting that the most righteous religion is going to have to allow for some conundrums, a few miracles, and, now and then, utter nonsense.
The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of people ~ St. Paul
There are things that exist outside of our ability to understand, including, but not limited to, the shenanigans of God.
But auditing the modern mind’s limits is not a favored modern pastime. We’ve come so far over the past ~ 100 years and are much impressed, now adding to our ken — our ability to understand — by leaps and bounds. When we compare what we know today with what we knew back then, we look like geniuses. When we compare our ken to a being that knows everything about everything (should he/she/it exist), we look like a basketful of newborn kittens.
Speaking on a personal level, I think the horrors of this world are an abomination. I’ve experienced a few, and on occasion can be found yelling obscenities at God for them. Add to that the global abominations that happen every second and it’s hard for me to believe.
At the same time, embracing the existence of a Good, all-powerful God has brought much peace, hope, and power to my life. But it’s not just the cognitive, theological belief that has made a difference, it’s the relationship, if you’ll allow such an idea. The sins of the world, mine included, have been obliterated, leaving me (and you) with a further bit of nonsense: unfettered access to God. No conditions. No limitations.
No human, and certainly no other religion will extend such an invitation.
In my worst moments I can go to him and find a level of peace that I can’t find anywhere else.
“When anxiety comes upon you, talk to God. With an attitude of humility and thankfulness, ask for help, and the peace of God, which transcends your ken, will keep your heart and your mind from drying out…” ~ St. Paul
Because I’ve been the beneficiary of God’s unconditional goodness, I’m compelled to extend it, with equal unconditionality, to everyone else. If I could expand the limits of my ken a bit, I’d do it much more often, but I do feel that this particular behavior expands my ken like nothing else.
The more I express unconditional goodness, the more I understand how unconditionally good God is.
Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash
I do like this post. However, I feel compelled to point out that this statement, “No human, and certainly no other religion will extend such an invitation,” isn’t quite true.
I’m not sure if you follow my blog, but I’m Kemetic, meaning that I worship the ancient Egyptian gods. I once had a priest on my blog trying to tell me that Isis (whom I call Aset, her original name) doesn’t exist. I finally blocked him because I wasn’t getting anywhere with this guy and I felt like all he was doing was harassing me, but if I’d had that discussion with him today, I’d be saying, “I can’t explain why Aset hasn’t shown Herself to you, but I know She exists.” Seriously, how can any believer answer that? Unless our “telepathy” happens to work on deities? 🙂
My faith isn’t as hung up on the human condition of sinfulness as Catholicism, in which I was raised (or Christianity in general). In the Kemetic faith, there is no need to sacrifice a god on a cross. Instead, creation is happening at every moment, meaning that every sunrise presents us with another chance, an opportunity to do better.
Sometimes, however, the gods did get bent at misbehavior. There is a story about how Ra wanted to punish mankind for their (for lack of a better word) sinfulness, so he sent Sekhmet down to wreak some havoc. But she went too far, Ra repented, and he had to go down and get her drunk on pomegranate beer – she drank it, thinking it was blood – to get her to calm down. I think this is an early story, though, and certainly doesn’t represent the current Kemetic view on “sinfulness.” Just do better; don’t do an evil thing twice. And if nothing else, there are always the spells of the Book of the Dead, which will help get the deceased into the afterlife. There is no hell, although there is a punishment reserved for the severely wicked: nonexistence. Your heart is eaten by Ammut the Devourer and you cease to exist. I don’t know which is scarier, eternal torment or ceasing to exist.
And shit certainly happened to the ancient Egyptians: the Nile flood could be either too high or too low, invaders could come, etc. The three Intermediate Periods in ancient Egyptian history are basically stories of how the Egyptians lost their faith and went through bad times as a result (or at least that’s one way they can be interpreted, and that’s just me talking; the First, Second, and Third Intermediate Periods are real, historical things).
Anyway, I’m not here to convert you – may the gods (all of them, yours, mine and the others) forbid such a thing! I’m just illustrating a different way of looking at things. I know that most people don’t even know that some still worship the Egyptian gods, so maybe this entire comment can be dismissed. In any event, perhaps I’ve given you something to think about.
Thanks for this post.
Thanx for your thoughtful response.
I’d say that, as a 56 year old, I’m not a supporter of either focus too heavily in “sin” (or whatever we want to call it) or not focusing enough on it. Religions that seek to downplay the horrors that humanity perpetrates are just as misguided as religions that place too much emphasis on it.
If I gave you the impression that my faith downplays the horrors that humanity is capable of, I have misinformed you and I apologize. We do try to live a good life. If you’d like to check this out, the Wikipedia entry on Ma’at probably does a better job of explaining our philosophy than I did above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maat. I don’t think we would have the 42 negative confessions, which essentially serve as our Ten Commandments, if we didn’t care about our behavior.
Thank you for allowing my comment through.