The world in which we live

Before tragedy struck home, many of the issues I’ve been wrestling with were intellectual problems that I could consider and then set aside again without answers. They’ve become much more visceral and harder to ignore. I find myself feeling other tragedies in a deeper way, and theodicy has become very personal.

The boundaries of involvement in the cosmos for a God who values free will are hard to draw or imagine, which is part of a standard defense of God. How can we blame God when we’re the ones who commit so much violence and make such poor choices regarding those around us? There’s truth to that line of thought. But violence and pain are built into this world in such a deep way that the age-old questions rise again: exactly how is God working in the midst of all of this, and how did a world like this come to be?

Earthquakes, floods and other so-called “acts of God”. Sickness, disease, death. Survival of the fittest in the natural world. Where is God? Granted, the free-will debate leaches into even these as we, by our choices, wreak havoc on the climate, pollute air and earth and water, or perpetuate poverty and unjust social conditions which can exacerbate many of these “natural” problems.

I think many Christians would agree that the cosmos is broken, that it is not now as it is intended to be. The fact that all of creation is groaning with us for the day when all things will be renewed does not make it any easier to live surrounded by brokenness. I’m not privy to the hows and whys of the rupture in creation. And while I find theorizing about it to be an interesting side project², I am more interested in how God is working in the midst of it.

God’s way of working in the world

As I have thought about this over the last months, I’ve had to deal with some common ideas that come up repeatedly in conversations and the media. Much of my processing has been in relation to these phrases and to the underlying assumptions behind them. I’ll jot some of them below, followed by some questions that are raised in my mind by these concepts.

• “God is all powerful” followed closely by “God is all loving”
  It’s difficult to square these two affirmations, taken at face value. If you are all powerful but don’t intervene when someone you love is being abused, are you all loving? If you’re all loving and want to intervene, why don’t you? And if God does intervene, why in some cases and not others? Selective intervention seems capricious. The traditional line seems to say “God has all the power but is not responsible for how God uses it.” To say “you need to take the long view” resonates on a certain level but also smacks of “pie in the sky when you die” and a devaluing of the here-and-now, which it seems to me God cares about very much.

• “God is in control” and “God must have had a reason for doing this” and we have to trust “God’s will” and it must be part of “God’s plan for your life”
  Is God really a control freak? I wrote in our reflections during the days following Cara’s death that it didn’t seem to me that God “was sacrificing pawns in a cosmic chess game that was going perfectly according to plan.” Instrumentalizing an innocent person does not fit into my (admittedly incomplete) concept of God. This raises the question of whether God always gets God’s way. It seems to me that the answer is no.

• I am even less comfortable than before with language like “God told me” or even “God has really blessed me”
  Speaking with certainty about what God is doing seems naïve,³ and the language of God’s blessing can unintentionally suggest that if God didn’t do the same for you, God has instead singled you out for cursing or for the withholding of blessings, giving you stones when you asked for bread.

These types of clichés leave me with a bad taste in my mouth, but they seem to have wide circulation. Many folks hold these beliefs sincerely but sometimes it seems people haven’t really thought about what they are saying. I’ve been trying to find another way of thinking about this that makes sense to me, and have identified a few concepts that have been somewhat helpful.

• God suffers with us.
  This was the strong sense we had during our experience with Cara and it still rings true. Rather than a God who is without emotion, detached from our existence, I sensed a God who is intimately involved with us and who suffers with us.

• There are various types of power and control, and God works in surprising ways.
  God’s power in our world seems to be primarily through weakness — an unpredictable, slow-moving, “underneath” power that turns traditional power against itself, gently pushing tendrils of life up in the midst of death, as opposed to an external force exerting itself to bend everything to fit into an intractable plan⁴. God seems to be in the business of a bottom-up control which is a few steps removed from the end result. Rather than dictating specific actions or events, God’s power is nourishing and sustaining life from below; allowing, inviting, and encouraging good to result from the things that happen despite themselves (and despite the fact that they may not be a part of “God’s will”).

  I don’t say that it’s easy or even possible to imagine what God is up to, but these metaphors provide me with the hope that God’s work in the world continues and the act of believing in redemption despite the evidence of this moment can be a radical protest against the darkness.
  
  I was talking to one of my brothers recently and he mentioned the concepts of “right-handed power” and “left-handed power”, which were explored in a book he is reading by Robert Farrar Capon. Capon describes right-handed power as the kind of power we expect, the kind of power we think of as the very definition of power, forcing itself in some way into a bad situation to straighten it out by might. Left-handed power, on the other hand, is “power that looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from nonintervention.”⁵ Weakness and nonintervention describes quite well my experience of God in the midst of Cara’s life and death.
  
  I am reminded that Jesus’ disciples were expecting their Messiah to swoop in, gather an army and usher in a new kingdom by the sword. But Jesus’ method of overthrowing empire involved the empire having its way with him, torturing him, killing him. I find myself frustrated that God hasn’t swooped in and set things right, or surprised that the brokenness is allowed to have its way with us, forgetting that this radical vulnerability and weakness is exactly the kind of power Jesus exhibits. Not only do we worship a God we can beat up, we worship a God we do beat up and one who allows us to get beat up, too.

Conclusion: Ubi caritas

While it makes sense in a certain way that God would use “left-handed power” in situations in which people are making decisions, it is harder to swallow in situations in which human decisions don’t seem to be at play. Why no right-handed power to protect innocent lives in the midst of earthquakes and lightning strikes? Would it be so bad to impose some force to protect children from cancer and disease and random accidents? But as near as I can tell, God’s power consistently shows up as weakness, whether humans appear to be the root cause of the problem or not. We’re planted here among the tares, the cancers, the diseases that were sown among us by an enemy, and apparently we’re too enmeshed with each other to come apart cleanly. Somehow pulling them up would uproot us as well.

I don’t claim that the “answers” I have been pondering are fully satisfying, and much remains outside of my grasp. But I do know that my experience has stripped a lot of periphery from the way I see the world, and given me a new appreciation for the mystery of God and of God’s way of working in the world. With so many unknowns and unanswerables, I can only throw myself and the world on God’s mercy and let the chips fall as they may. In the meantime, I will continue trying to live into the coming kingdom knowing I’m going to continue to fail. It isn’t easy trying to live as though God’s kingdom is here now when it is so clearly is not.

I think Janel and I each felt betrayed and abandoned by God in many ways, but we still loved Cara deeply, which was an indicator to me that God was still profoundly present. That tension between God’s presence and God’s absence continues for me, but the phrase that Cara’s name was taken from (and which I’ve since had tattooed on my arm) has become a mantra of sorts: Ubi Caritas, Deus Ibi Est.

Where love exists, God is present. It seems a strange learning to take from a tragedy and the heartbreaking loss of a daughter, but for all the questions that have been raised in me, the one thing I am more confident of than ever is that love is the core of our calling. If we want to participate in whatever the hell God is up to, love has to be our guide. Or, to put it another way, if it doesn’t involve love, religion is worthless.