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Start With Life Last Sunday someone reflecting on our efforts to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina said, with pain etched in his face, “I wish I could understand why these things happen.” The question wrenched my heart, because it is a question that every thinking, feeling human being asks, and the conventional answers are not very satisfying. My lovingly adopted daughter said when she was 15, “I don’t believe in God.” “Why not?” I asked. “Because if there were a God, no mother would ever give birth and then have to give up her baby.” To this child, separation from her Korean birthmother, whose only legacy was a few typewritten words of hope for her baby’s future, seemed the ultimate proof of a godless universe. From her pain, my daughter created theological meaning, something humans have done for thousands of years. She began with the assumption that any “God” deserving of the title would be both good and all-powerful. Then she looked around at the world, and concluded there was no such being. Whether tragedy is widespread (the tsunami or hurricane or earthquake that kills thousands), or isolated and individual (like my daughter’s pain), each human being who suffers does so intensely and personally. And if those suffering people are raised in a culture or religion that reveres a deity, especially the good and powerful God imagined in Judaism and Christianity, the pain and loss is magnified by the accompanying question: Why would God allow this terrible thing to happen? But before I talk about this weighty subject, I want to offer you these words of the Sufi poet Hafiz:
Reminded by Hafiz how inadequate human explanations are likely to be, I apologize in advance for even trying to explain the mysterious universe in a few words—and if you want to laugh yourself silly, go ahead. (But step outside.) In the days immediately after the shudder of the earth that sent a massive tsunami across the Indian Ocean , one self-described Christian fundamentalist preacher called it God’s wrath against the “heathen.” Another of the same stripe recalled that some of the inundated countries are notorious for persecuting Christians—so massive destruction was, presumably, God’s punishment. A Catholic journalist wrote that the tsunami had taught us valuable lessons—we who were far from danger had learned to be more charitable and compassionate at the expense of the suffering of others. These conclusions, though purporting to arise out of Christian sensibilities and the Judeo-Christian image of a just and omnipotent God, actually paint a portrait of a sick, self-absorbed and wrathful being neither just nor benevolent. Other Christians, speaking from a Calvinist stance, announced that the tsunami was a direct expression of God’s will, although the reasons were hidden and impenetrable; and that, perhaps, suffering and death revealed divine attributes (though what those might be is hard to imagine, at least as positive divine attributes). Another Catholic scholar suggested that the opportunity to suffer gives people the opportunity to be like Christ, and therefore ultimately good. And another Christian theologian argued that God is just and punishments are measured out in accordance with what people deserve—even if we are talking about a small child swept away in a flood. These ideas aren’t just the outbursts of crackpots; they are the efforts of sincere Christian theologians who are convinced that God is good but chose to send a tsunami. Starting from this assumption, the best they can do, really, is to cloak in scholarly terms the old folk saying, “God works in mysterious ways.” This is not a good enough answer for me. I do not accept the idea of a God who deliberately sends tsunamis and hurricanes smashing through human lives in pursuit of some mysterious eternal plan. This image, to me, is a God made by humans who believe that the ends justifies the means, even if they can’t imagine what the ends might be. The Eastern Orthodox Christian theologian David Bentley Hart takes a different approach, one I share to some degree. He begins by telling the story of a Sri Lankan man of enormous physical strength who was unable to prevent four of his five children from perishing in the tsunami. This man recited to a reporter the names of his lost children, ending with the name of his four-year-old son, and was utterly overwhelmed by weeping.(1.) As Hart puts it, “Only a moral cretin at that moment would have attempted to soothe his anguish by assuring him that his children had died as a result of God’s eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels, and that in fact their deaths had mysteriously served God’s purposes in history….Most of us would have the good sense to be ashamed to speak such words.”(2.) When another human being is caught up in intractable sorrow, words about God’s mysterious ways are not only of no comfort whatsoever, they are more in the nature of an apology for believing in a benevolent and all-powerful God who would nonetheless do such a thing. Hart turns to the Christian story at this point, saying that everything Jesus revealed about God is “life and light and infinite love.” With the life and ethos of Jesus as his touchstone, Hart rejects the idea of a God who moves through history purposefully bringing storms, plagues, and death to accomplish divine purposes. In other words, Hart says, God did not send the tsunami nor command the winds of Hurricane Katrina. Here is where the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart, all Buddhists, and I agree: there is no human-personified God who for divine purposes sets off natural events to ravage the Earth like poorly aimed remote control toys. The natural world is the way it is. Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis happen. Illness and death happen. They are by no means the immediate emissaries of God’s will. Life emerged from an improbable beginning in the big bang, and from the boiling clouds of primordial particles there came stars, and in the unthinkable heat at every star’s heart is generated the very building blocks of life as we know it. Planets, oceans, trees, fish, birds, dogs, people all developed from that chaotic, unlikely clash of matter and energy. From the geothermal activity of the earth’s core to the coiling air and water currents on its surface, the very Earth itself continues to boil and bubble with the natural processes that sometimes erupt into human affairs with violence and destruction. Where is God in all this? To Buddhists, there is no deity; there is simply a drive toward unity of all things. To Hart, the Orthodox theologian, there is a “goodness indwelling all creation” that is masked and interrupted by the trauma of the natural world. The seas may rise, he says, without “will or thought or purpose or mercy,” but there is nonetheless “a glory not entirely hidden…shining in and through and upon all things." (3.) Others thinking along the same lines have said that God is what calls us to goodness. Hart sees God not as an actor in the stream of time but as an unfathomable presence that moves outside our frame of time and being, yet contributes possibility and hope like the glimmer of sunlight on a broken mirror. Hart says that when he sees the death of a child, he does not see the face of God but of his enemy: that God does not use death to unite the strands of history. I say, Amen. But here Hart and I part ways. To explain death, Hart describes this world as “fallen.” He does not mean, precisely, the story of Adam and Eve and the apple, but he takes that story as a metaphor for a universe that has somehow slipped apart from the wholeness of a more glorious creation. For me, the miracle of our universe is life itself: “the springing of cypresses [and] the sheen of lakes, the laughter of fountains, …the breathing of the world”;(4.) the “tall blue starry strangeness of being here at all.”(5.) The miracle is that our eyes see beauty and that our hearts yearn for love and justice. The miracle is that we have emerged from primordial chaos: beings who imagine a good and loving God—beings whose theologians turn cartwheels to explain and justify the suffering that inhabits our cosmos. Walt Whitman, the great poet of the natural world, who served as a nurse in the American Civil War, saw great suffering. Like all those who have known pain, like the theologians, like my daughter reflecting on her birthmother’s suffering, Whitman was driven to the question “Why?” “ The question,” Whitman writes, “The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?”(6.) To answer this sad, recurring question, I start not with God but with life. I start with the creative principle at work in the process that is our universe; the emergence of life and its persistence; I start here, with life, and see the miracle of being that somehow has arisen from nothing. Walt Whitman answers his question, literally, with these words: “Answer: That you are here—that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.” There is a love, a justice, a calling to goodness that resounds through the universe, a miraculous unfolding of life; and we are part of it, we who love and weep and cry out; we who sow and harvest, we who cling to each other in times of joy and sorrow, we who wade through floods and run into burning buildings to rescue those who are trapped there; we who demand justice from the universe, and one day will create justice like a mighty stream: we start with life, and go on from there. 1. David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea (2005), at 99. 5. Franz Wright, “The Only Animal” 6. Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 166. |
