First post in a long time, long overdue. I’d hoped to have something happier to spur me out of my “sabbatical.” Today was a dark day in the news. Two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon. 3 people were killed, over a hundred were injured. One of the fatalities was an 8 year old. Not too long ago, there was an even more horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children died. I’m reminded of that tonight.
Tragedies will happen in your lifetime, and you will have to find your way to cope and make sense of that tragedy. I don’t profess to have the answers, but I can share how I cope. All I can do when these things happen is focus on how much I love you and your mother, and try to be as grateful as possible that we were spared the pain that other families are going through. There’s an expression that comes to mind, “there but for the grace of God go I” which basically means “thank God that didn’t happen to me/us.”
God is a tricky subject when it comes to tragedies. A frequent challenge in religious and spiritual discourse is “the problem of evil.” It’s seemingly incompatible with the idea of an omnipotent and benevolent God that evil could exist in the world. If God exists, and God is all-powerful, then why do we have evil? Why did the Holocaust happen? Or 9/11? Or a million other local tragedies that decimate individual families? How can God exist if a bomb goes off in a public event that kills an 8 year old child?
The problem with “the problem of evil” is that the premise itself is flawed, mostly because we think of God in too-human terms. Granted, I have (I think) an unusual perspective on God. I don’t think of God as an anthropomorphic grandfatherly bearded figure in the clouds. I don’t think of God as having any discernable characteristics we could recognize in our perspective as finite, mortal creatures. I think our understanding of God is best met when we identify the things we know are not true of God. Fancy academics would call this “apophatic theology.”
Here is what I think about God, in plainer English. God is not intervening in Sunday Night Football, regardless of the prayers invoked by either team. God is not in any way to thank (or blame) for pop stars winning Grammy awards. God is not a being, but being itself. God is the transcendent part of life. God is love. God is the feeling you get when music stirs your soul.
The problem of evil is not a problem of God, it’s a problem of Man. We don’t have God to blame for bad things happening in life. We have ourselves. John F. Kennedy once said, “Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man.” We cannot shirk from the responsibilities we have to each other. You are better served when tragedy strikes to focus your energy on how you can make the world a better place than you are to wallow helplessly in the wake of a tragedy that “God” failed to stop.
We have man-made problems in our world, many complex and ranging far beyond our borders. Poverty, injustice, inequality, lack of education, mental illness, etc. – there is no shortage of triggers for violence and tragedy. But tragedy is dramatic because of its stark contrast to joy in life. And by and large, our lives are joyous. The pain of learning an 8 year old child died in the bombing today is so severe because of the joy children bring into our lives. As a parent, there is nothing more painful than imagining the loss of a child, because there is no greater love than a parent’s love for their children.
We live in an uncertain world. We are indeed mortal. Tomorrow is guaranteed to none of us. But that scarcity is what gives our lives meaning. We have only so long to live on this earth, and our choices have consequences. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a vacuum, and often we have to live with tragedies like what happened today in Boston. When these tragedies occur, we have two choices – to embrace the darkness or the light. We can wallow and despair in wonder at what evil could have driven someone to commit such an act of madness, or we can focus on how things like this inevitably bring out the best of humanity.
Here is a great quote from the lovable Fred Rogers (TV’s “Mister Rogers”), which puts this in great perspective:
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.”
Another good perspective on this came today from comedian Patton Oswalt, who wrote the following on Facebook in response to today’s bombing:
Boston. Fucking horrible.
I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”
But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem — one human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.
But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in a while, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.
But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evildoers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.
So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”
There is no answer to “the problem of evil,” except to acknowledge that bad things happen to good people for no reason. It doesn’t have to make sense. It does remind us that life is fleeting and precious. God is the transcendent part of life, and if you’re looking for God in the face of tragedy, you will still find it. God is love, not the absence of pain.
I saw on the news just now that a New York organization projected a part of this message onto a building in support of the people of Boston.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
These are the words I would leave you with. You cannot worry about the problem of evil. There is no answer. You can only remember the power of love, and look to that for comfort.