On Suffering

I'll be following up with a lot of notes from my retreat, but I wanted to address the issue of suffering as it's been very prominently placed in my awareness these past few weeks leading up to and during my retreat. It'll come back up again in the retreat notes too.

My son's friend, who has been staying with us, found out the day before I left for retreat that his cousin had been shot and killed in Philadelphia. Just another young black man left for dead on the streets of Philadelphia with no word on the news because after over 200 such deaths, what's new about it?

He posted a blog on his MySpace page titled: Can I give you my loss.... to feel...to hold close...Can I give you my pain...To Feel..

He wants to know why. Why the suffering? Is this for God's pleasure? It's been the recurring theme lately. People asking, "Why the suffering? What kind of a God permits evil, or permits suffering?"

The danger in getting into answering these questions is that people ask them most often when they're really angry, and really hurt, and nothing less than a complete undoing of whatever is causing their pain will satisfy.

Well, we can't undo what's been done. In the merest nanosecond after the fact, it becomes a part of the unchangeable past.

There is no suitable explanation that will satisfy under those conditions. The answer has to be addressed to the intellect and when the soul is in pain, the intellect tends to close. One can only hope that the time will come when pain will subside, and the intellect will reopen.

When that time does come, we can consider the dilemma. Why would a God who creates all good and is all powerful allow so much suffering and harm come to his creation?

It's not a new question or series of questions. Scripture deals with them almost sequentially.

"People suck and they're getting worse. I don't know why God doesn't just wipe them all out and start over again clean." - Read the story of Noah. It's not only about the rainbow.

"If God knows everything that's in our hearts, then God should know who the really awful people are and wipe out only those people. Why wait? God knows they suck. Get rid of them now." - Read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It's not only about sodomy and salt.

"I'm a good person. I do everything I can to do the right thing. I'm nice to people. I don't screw people over. I know other people who are WAY worse than I am, and they seem to get all the good stuff! Meanwhile, my life sucks ass!" - Read the story of Job because it's not only about one guy's bad day.

The story of Job has probably the most succinct and forthright response for suffering in the world and while the answer is concise, it still deserves some consideration.

The message God gives to Job and his friends essentially says that unless we were around when the heavens were made, when the earth was formed, and when life was breathed upon the earth, we would have no way of knowing the why's and wherefore's about anything. So stop telling God how to do the job.

Maybe that seems harsh, but I was reminded of this when I came back to work after retreat and opened my e-mail. Dozens and dozens of unread messages scrolled across the screen in front of me with no way for me to know what they said unless I opened each and every one in turn. In order to manage them, I grouped them by subject, tried to prioritize them by what seemed most important, but I only had a subject line to go on.

Sometimes I could tell the importance of the message from reading the subject line. Many times I couldn't. The only possible way for me to know what was in those messages was to read them one.at.a.time.

In order for me to genuinely understand the universe and the workings of the world as God understands, I would have to be able to perceive the universe in all its entirety, both past, present, and future and all the possible outcomes for every action taken by all living creatures anywhere, and I would have to perceive them all at once.

It would be like having all of my e-mails opened before me on one screen and being able to not only comprehend every individual message, but each message's relationship to another, AND be able to prioritize them in order of importance, AANNNDDD answer them immediately with exactly the answer the writer hoped to receive.

We all know this is not how it happens. Here is what can happen - I open one e-mail and read the message. I get pissed off because I don't like the message. I think the writer of the message is a buffoon. I write a terse response that makes clear my opinion of the writer. I hit send.

Then I open the next message, which refutes all of my initial impressions. There are new developments not included in the original e-mail. New information is brought to light. The writer of the first e-mail wasn't a buffoon after all. The matter has been cleared up. I have no reason to be angry, and never did. Now I'm ass.

I know I'm not the only one who makes this mistake. I know because I've been on the receiving end of those "you're a buffoon" e-mails followed shortly by the "sorry I called you a buffoon. signed, the ass." apology e-mails.

If we can't get through one e-mail session without misunderstanding each other, misinterpreting words or actions, taking offense when none was meant simply because we do not have all the information, why would we ever consider ourselves capable of being able to understand the reasoning behind every moment passing in the universe? And yet, when a certain event makes no sense to us or causes us pain, we have no problem questioning the intelligence of God and coming to the conclusion that God must be a buffoon, if God exists at all!

Do I really want to have to extend to God the "sorry I called you a buffoon. signed, the ass." apology, or am I better off wrapping my head around the idea that maybe I don't know as much as I think I do?

Then there's the issue of "evil" versus "tragic". Catholic writers, particularly St. Augustine, wrote long and hard on the subject of evil, the privation of good, and other philosophical thoughts. If you ever get time to read any of it, many of them are very good, but my sense of them is that there's no distinction made between what is malevolently evil and what is simply tragic.

I think the distinction is important when it comes to deciding how much we want to assign to God as the perpetrator of evil, which I'll cover in another post.