The question of why is suffering so common and indiscriminate has no good answer. Some, like Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People", try to save God by claiming that He is Good but not all Powerful. In this framework God is involved and is caring but is limited and often can do no more than suffer along with His creation. I struggled for a long time with this apparent diminishment of God. I tried writing Theodicies to make God no less than what theologians and preachers have claimed He is, but God can not be saved by any trick of language or sophistry of reason from a hack like me or a genius like (insert name of your favourite theologian or philosopher here).................................................
God stands before us as nakedly proud and overbearing as Job's encounter describes Him. We, like Job, can demand an accounting but we will not get one.
So we are left with a clear choice...we either accept the ambiguity and the confusion of a world at odds with the simple faith of our youth and bow before this mystery...mouths closed...hearts broken, yet still hoping
or we must forfeit our faith and the hope of a redeemer who will stand with us upon the earth and someday give meaning to the trail of absurdity that we have unwillingly walked upon.
I am closed in between these two options and I only slightly favour the way of faith over resignation.
I can never be sure if the thread by which my faith hangs will hold but as it holds I remain in the church and remain a Christian.
Absurdity is so evident that I can not deny it, I can not rationalize it, I can not mitigate it. Therefore I tentatively embrace it and say that the evidence of our lives tells of a God who is unknowable and who favours the unexpected and the unexplainable. The evidence suggests that He is a connoisseur of the bizarre. As such I can even make peace with monumental natural and human disasters because beauty is no longer in the eye of this beholder it is only in the Eye of The Beholder.
So we are left with a clear choice...we either accept the ambiguity and the confusion of a world at odds with the simple faith of our youth and bow before this mystery...mouths closed...hearts broken, yet still hoping
or we must forfeit our faith and the hope of a redeemer who will stand with us upon the earth and someday give meaning to the trail of absurdity that we have unwillingly walked upon.
I am closed in between these two options and I only slightly favour the way of faith over resignation.
I can never be sure if the thread by which my faith hangs will hold but as it holds I remain in the church and remain a Christian.
Absurdity is so evident that I can not deny it, I can not rationalize it, I can not mitigate it. Therefore I tentatively embrace it and say that the evidence of our lives tells of a God who is unknowable and who favours the unexpected and the unexplainable. The evidence suggests that He is a connoisseur of the bizarre. As such I can even make peace with monumental natural and human disasters because beauty is no longer in the eye of this beholder it is only in the Eye of The Beholder.
And the Beholder apparently loves the deformed, the damaged, the odd and the poor.....after all, He made so many of us. The ugliness and suffering of this world must have a beauty and a reason far above our ability to perceive it. So we must simply accept the world we have and continue to love mercy and to live life as if Love is eternal and powerful.
If what God wants for this world is as simple as we thought it was, then this world is a testimony to an Under-achieving God....but, if we examine it as the art of the creator and curator of curiosities and mysteries whose ways are beyond our finding out it is truly a place of wonderful and bewildering beauty . Such a world is not evidence of an under-achieving God. It is evidence of our under-perceiving.
Lord give us eyes to see and hearts to perceive the beauty in the ugliness around us and faith to embrace this life even when we can not perceive the beauty beneath.
LH
1 comment:
Amazing post Len...still digesting.
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