The Clumpiness of Suffering

Last week was one of those weeks where for some reason, ill tidings seem everywhere.   Both in my family and in my church family, there's been unwelcome news.  Any week that involves caring for sick dogs so loved ones can meet with hospice and online research to help deepen my grasp of that nasty little [fornicator] glioblastoma multiforme cannot be a good week.

And as I drifted through the endless media data-dump of the week, a few tiny whispers of sorrow sparkled darkly.  

Like the story of a local family, moving west for dad's new job, the pregnant mom and the little boys and the dogs in the car up front, dad in the back with the car.  At four am, that overtired semi-driver didn't notice in time that they were stopped for construction and plowed them all out of this mortal coil in a mess of fire and steel.

Like the embedded narrative in an article about missing children in India, the story of a shattered Indian man whose wife died in childbirth, with their infant daughter then dying of dehydration after a stomach infection shortly after, and now his cherished, only son has disappeared, abducted as chattel.

Lord have mercy.

I have never viewed suffering itself as evidence of divine punishment, not ever.   One cannot be Christian and think this.   Jesus said as much, and then he in his own life showed us the falseness of that way of thinking.   We are mortal creatures, woven up of dirt and water.  We live.  We die.  And both living and dying involve encounters with suffering.

Where I struggle sometimes, theologically, is with the peculiarly sustained concentrations of random sorrow that seem to afflict some souls.  They seem, for all intents and purposes, to be perfectly decent human beings, absolutely indistinguishable in intellect, wisdom, and spirit from the rest of humanity.   And yet woes befall them with great frequency.   Loved ones die, or betray, or abandon them.  Illness of flesh and spirit is a continual presence.   Poverty can be present, but a parade of loss and tragedy can define even the life of those seemingly free of material want.  It becomes a seemingly dominant feature of their entire story, the bitter thread that seems to give structure to their lives.

It is easy, I think, to chalk up such things entirely to some repairable spiritual failing.   It is easy to say, well, suffering can feed anxiety, hatred, addiction, cynicism, and depression, and those demons have a pesky tendency to amplify and sustain the dark cycles that cause suffering, driving us more and more deeply towards our shadow self.   There is some truth in that, without question.   Waging war against those pernicious critters in us can help stop those cycles.   Sometimes.

But there are plenty of souls out there who are free from those demonic force-magnifiers, whose lives are consistently touched by pain and brokenness.

Ultimately, my own awareness of my mortal limitations reminds me that we are part of creation, and as such, we're as vulnerable to the dynamism and imbalance of creation as any other creature.   Why did the wind concentrate slightly more, bringing down that one tree, and not another?   Why did that healthy young doe miss her footing, now limping lame and vulnerable?   Because that's what happened.

But as sentient beings capable of understanding ourselves and connecting more deeply with our Creator, our encounters with suffering and brokenness are different.   Faith allows us to face down entropy while maintaining our integrity as beings.   It allows us to cohere, in ways that seem impossible, when our entire world has collapsed around us.   It allows us to show grace, manifest mercy, and share strength with our fellow beings as they experience times of loss and weakness.

Haiti and Human Suffering

On the day after Christmas five years and a few weeks ago, Indonesia was struck by a massive tsunami. Hundreds of thousands of human beings lost their lives, killed by the onslaught of an unstoppable tidal surge. It was a time of immense tragedy and human suffering. In coming to terms with this event, many folks of a religious persuasion offered up reasons that God might inflict such suffering on humankind. Among some sections of Christianity, stories were told of churches remaining unharmed. That the vast majority of those who lost their lives were Muslim...so...well...perhaps God was annoyed at their lack of Christian faith. In the conservative Islamic world, the spin was both different and exactly the same. Indonesia was being punished for being insufficiently Muslim, allowing the infidels to drink and wear bikinis and spend lots of money in beachside resorts to sustain the local economy.

Today, the news comes from Haiti that a sizable earthquake has devastated that poverty-stricken nation. Back when I was a kid, the little evangelical free church my family attended in London used to regularly provide supplies to Haitian communities. We wrote letters to Haitian kids. Things were hard there thirty years ago, and they haven't improved. It is the Bangladesh of the Northern Hemisphere. The reports coming in this morning are spotty, but the likelihood is that there are many, many thousands dead. Slipshod construction and the crowding that comes from endemic poverty makes a temblor unusually devastating. Wretchedly undeveloped infrastructure and incompetent, corrupt government make it even worse. It is going to be bad.

Over the next week or so, the eyes of our nation will be turned to that broken state. Until some juicy celebrity scandal reclaims our undivided attention, that is. During this week, I do not doubt that somewhere, someone who claims to be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth will decide that God is somehow responsible for this event. Perhaps Haitians were not praying hard enough. Or they weren't the "right sort of Christian." Or they were immoral. Maybe someone will decide that the practice of vodun is to blame. There has to be a reason!

We can't help ourselves. We want to believe that faith somehow gets us excused from suffering, even though our faith teaches no such thing. We want to believe that just praying hard enough will protect us from disaster and keep us fat and happy and rolling in material blessings, even though our faith shows us nothing of the sort. Our desire to come up with a theological reason for the bad things that happen has nothing to do with our Maker, and everything to do with our own egocentrism.

But the reality of existence is that we are small and easily broken, and that death comes eventually to us all. Faith does not change that reality. What it does, though, is help us respond to that reality. What a faithful response needs to be has nothing to do with explanations or justifications. That sort of speculation is actively counterproductive.

Instead, Christians need to respond with caring. We need to be providing evidence of the love that lies at the heart of our faith. That will come in the form of material aid, in doctors and medicine and food and blankets and rebuilding supplies. It will come through the presence of aid workers who give comfort.

It is that caring that matters, that work that matters, that effort to bring about good in the face of the reality of our smallness and mortality that matters.

Atheist Theodicy is an Oxymoron

Whilst engaged in some highly entertaining back and forth about God and the nature of being yesterday, I found myself suddenly wondering about the place of theodicy in the arsenal of arguments used by atheists.

Theodicy, in the event you're unfamiliar with the term, is the indictment of the divine. Properly understood, it's a challenge issued to a god who is failing to uphold the terms of their relationship with a devotee.

Let's say you're a follower of Cthulhu. You've gotten your hands on the Necronomicon, not just any copy, but one signed at Barnes and Noble by the Mad Arab himself. After years of preparation at Miskatonic University, you've found your way to the submerged city of R'lyeh. You've waited several increasingly depraved lifetimes for the stars to align in the appropriately disturbing eldritch patterns. You utter the incantations through lips steeled with glazed madness, summoning the most vile of the Elder Gods into our plane of existence, where it can begin unleashing the waking nightmare that will consume all of being.

But when the Ancient One finally exudes through the rift, it arrives with a slightly warm sixer and asks you're up for an evening of Super Mario Party with all of the avatars of Yog Sothoth.

Of course you'd be disappointed. The terms of the agreement have been violated! Where's the madness? Where's the gibbering? Isn't there going to be any gibbering? The Ancient One hasn't held up it's end of the bargain! OOOOOH!

That is the essence of theodicy...well, if you're way too much into H.P. Lovecraft, anyway.

Atheistic theodicy generally takes the form of a riff on the problem of suffering. If God is beneficent, omnipotent, and omniscient, then, the argument goes, God is doing a crappy job. Human beings suffer. We are afflicted with wars and plagues and disasters and Glenn Beck. Why would a loving God subject us to Glenn Beck? If you expect clear and mechanistic interventions from the Creator, then you are inevitably going to be as disappointed as an evicted devotee of Creflo A. Dollar.

I understand why the problem of suffering shakes so many folks from faith. There are are range of answers to that given by the world's faiths, some of which are utterly inadequate. Blind obedience or declaring the self-evidently horrific to be somehow a manifestation of God's will are among the more feeble responses to mortal unpleasantness. The more conceptually robust answers revolve around divine inscrutability, a rejection of anthropocentrism, and the assertion of human agency in causing suffering. Both Buddhism and the sentient portions of Christianity handle the question of suffering differently, but in ways that have existential validity...if you're open-minded.

What I found myself wondering yesterday is this: is atheistic theodicy an oxymoron? Can it even exist? I find it akin to saying, "God does not exist, and He's a bastard, so you shouldn't believe in Him anyway." That isn't a coherent statement. You cannot sanely condemn a God that you don't believe exists.

To be fair, I think what atheists are doing when they surface suffering as a reason not to believe isn't theodicy at all. It's a related thing, but not really that gut-wrenching challenge born of existential anguish that comes from the heart of the suffering faithful. I've been there.

For the atheist, the problem of suffering or injustice is just a rhetorical tool, part of the explanation one gives for one's nonbelief and can present in an effort to persuade others of the validity of your position. It's a fair challenge, and one that requires an honest and respectful response, but it isn't theodicy.

It's a challenge to another's faith, not God. Creodicy, perhaps?

Sin Tastes Better With Bacon

After many years of wheedling and cajoling from the boys, my family appears headed down the road towards getting a dog. I never had pets as a kid, mostly as a function of a semi-transient continent-hopping childhood. Now that we've settled down into a stable surburban quarter-acre, it looks like our family will be adding a furry critter to our number come 2010.

Pets are, for many folks, part of the family. Cats, dogs, and the occasional hamster are deeply loved and woven into the fabric of day-to-day family life. That often goes as far as bringing them for pastoral blessings, celebrating their birthdays, and similar schtuff. When they pass, they are mourned...not as deeply as we'd mourn a human, but mourned nonetheless. Folks of faith with pets frequently express the hope that those dear creatures will have a place in God's Kingdom. I am convinced that they will, but mulling over this leads me off on two related theological tangents:

Can a human being commit a sin against an animal? Someone who beats or abuses a puppy or kitten certainly isn't showing themselves as a person moved by the grace of God. Someone who trains animals for bloodsports would seem equally reprehensible, although I'm not sure how many football fans in Philly agree with me on that one. At a certain level, our willingness to vent our anger or hatred against the creatures around us is a measure of our sinfulness. We're meant to care for all creation, not beat it into submission or abuse it. Suffering is suffering is suffering. I am convinced that the harm we cause to our fellow creatures...even the nonhuman ones...is part of the measure by which we will be judged.

So if we can sin against animals, where does that leave thems of us who chow down on less-sentient critters? We're outraged at those folks who abuse dogs, but are happy as a clam to munch on a Bacon Double Bacon Burger that's comprised entirely of the flesh of animals that have lived short, brutish existences. The factory farm pigs that give us our delicious crunchy marbled fat-sticks exist in conditions that...were they, say, Golden Retrievers...would fill us with sputtering, pitchfork wielding, Congressman-calling outrage.

But...but...they're different, say you. Pork isn't puppies. Bacon doesn't bark.

Different? Not really, not by any meaningful standard. Both dogs and pigs are omnivorous social mammals. They have similar intelligences. There isn't any valid ethical difference between the process of preparing pork tenderloin and thit cho nuong, or between what goes into gaejangguk and a Mo's Bacon Chocolate Bar.

Yet we are an integral part of a system of industrial food production that inflicts impressively vast levels of suffering on creatures that are, for all intents and purposes, just as aware as those creatures we Jesus folk cherish and hope will somehow be cared for by their Creator.

It's a good thing God isn't just, or else we might be in for a world of hurt.

While the Weak Eat Only Vegetables

It's been...what...over 15 years since I ate meat. Initially, it was more a question of convenience than anything else. When you marry a vegetarian, you've got to be motivated to prepare your own meat for meals. And I wasn't. Just too lazy. I'd eat meat when we went out, though. Like this insanely delicious steak salad at the Little Viet Garden in Arlington. Cubes of steak marinated in red wine, salt, and garlic, placed hot atop a bed of cool crisp greens. It's been ten years, and I still have Pavlovian slobber in my mouth at the thought of it.

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought theologically about it, the less I was able to sustain it.

From the standpoint of our God-given stewardship over creation, I couldn't justify it. We are given dominion, sure. But the purpose of that dominion was to exercise care over the Eden into which God placed us. Eating the flesh of other creatures was not a part of that plan, or part of what God called good (Gen. 1:29). If in Christ I am a new creation, and if Christ's work in me is to restore the breach established by our fall from Eden's grace, then not eating meat can be one way of personally affirming the healing of that rift.

Further, I feel that it is my responsibility as a Christian to minimize the amount of hurt and suffering I cause in the world. That's what it means to live according to God's law of love. Though chickens, pigs, cows, and the occasional possum are not as sentient or aware of their mortality as we are, they suffer nonetheless. They know pain, they know fear, and they die just as we do.(Eccles. 1:18-19) I personally prefer not to harm another creature if I don't have to.

And I don't have to. So I don't.

Notice the recurrence of "personally." I'm more than happy to tell people the variety of reasons why I don't chow down on animal flesh. But if you choose not to, I have no right to judge you. God alone judges. That's the whole point Paul's making in Romans.