Two weeks have past since my visit home and I am now feeling once again acclimated to life in Santa Cruz, but this time it is different. My soul feels more at rest these days, not just because the political tension has eased, but because my own tension of being in an unhealthy space for me is coming to a close. The proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel" is in sight and I have hope, even though my future is anything but certain, that something meaningful lies ahead.
Change is stressful, even good change, but I am looking forward to starting new again.
This past week has brought to mind theodicy - one of those big words for one of life's big questions: how do we understand God as good in a world where so many bad things happen? This was the question we were pondering this past week at Friday morning Bible study. The answer most often suggested was that we need to be faithful - that God is testing us.... But....if God is the one doing these things to us, then what is the point of satan?
I find it rather disturbing that we would rather attribute the bad things that happen to us in the world to God, who is good, than to the forces of evil... It seems we only relegate spiritual attacks to satan and God is responsible for the evil that happens to us in the physical realm....
This makes no sense to me. God did not test Job - God allowed Job to be tested...by satan. God did not kill Job's family or cause Job to be afflicted by disease - satan did. God restored Job's health and Job's family...
I struggle to wrap my brain around the idea that God kills people with disease and natural disasters and wars. I have even heard people say that Katrina was God's judgment - a thought I find both repulsive and offensive. If God punishes people for being sinful, then what atonement is there? What grace have we received?
God as the author of evil and harm in the world is nonsensical to me. I do not think "God does things to us" when bad things happen. We can't control so much of what does happen to us, because the choices others make will affect us and the choices we each make affect others and we live in a world that is not perfect...
I believe God sustains us and loves us and uses the hard times to make us stronger. I'm not convinced that everything that happens happens for a reason. I say this because sometimes people just do really stupid things - I think God in God's goodness can use our stupidities for good, but I don't think that means they were intended to occur by some pre-mapped out "plan" or "will" God has for us, because if that is the case then wouldn't we be little more than puppets in God's puppet show?
I think God's all powerfulness is perhaps best demonstrated in God's restraint and vulnerability... I know it sounds perhaps heretical to describe God as vulnerable, but I believe that when we hurt ourselves and others that causes God pain and God chooses to be vulnerable, to feel that pain by loving us enough to give us free will.
I posit the suffering in the world that we experience, the bad things that happen to good folks, is not the will of an all-powerful, judgmental God, but the very opposite - exactly what God never wanted to happen, but that God helps us through. So maybe we should give God the credit for getting us through the bad stuff and even re-creating the bad stuff into good, instead of blaming God for the evil and violence that often results from a collective human choice to love self more than the common good (at the root of violence is the self...), to love self more than God (satan did this...). Maybe it's time to blame evil for evil and to recognize that sometimes we contribute to our own suffering and the suffering of others by making less than stellar choices...
Bad things happen to good people...but why blame God for that?
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