There is a lot of paradox in life, or seeming-paradox.
Immediately, you wonder how can God be good, and the world so rife with war,
agony, injustice; how can non-time create time from particles that exist
pre-particles, and when do such particles start moving if there is no time? Why
not (what is) before? To become the greatest, we must be the least; to see, we
must be blind; to truly live, we must die – we love and hate these dichotomous
paradoxes, and we claim to understand them, but they are hard questions, hard
callings.
And even as we are called to faith, we are called to press
our doubt, to seek out furtherance of our understanding of a God who is beyond
knowing. No one has seen the invisible God, yet we are called to seek and to
find God. Religion was made for the boundless, but I am a creature of chains,
fences, and guarded borders. I can’t always tell when I’m called to move beyond
the containment and into glory, or to stop, kneel, and lay beside the stillness
of the waters, resting in the lushest of grasses.
These questions are hard, no? I had one troubled person tell
me once about his own interaction with the question of divine intervention and
a perfectly good God. He said, if every time an accident was about to occur,
God reached out a hand and prevented it, a semblance of free will would be
revoked every time an atrocity was occurring. The problem with this is, why
does God fix some things and not others, and this is also a frightening pathway
into a very deistic view of God, a view incredibly commonplace in American religious
culture: God exists, but he’s sleeping, or distant. And this is not the God I
believe in.
Another viewpoint is that God works through the hands of his
followers, which means that every time I witness a terrible situation, more of
the guilt lands in my hands. That’s not particularly a comforting picture, but perhaps
it’s closer to the uncomfortable truth.
Yet we often claim God for the good things, as though God
had his fingers in every blessing pie, but ask why God isn’t around for the bad
things. It’s easy to see God in the valleys, the wildflowers, the rivers, the
dance and the music of the world, the beautiful – how do you see God in the
hospital room in the gaunt face of the afflicted, in the suffering, in the
malnourished? How do we bring God’s love there?
Good questions/discussion, thanks for sharing! God indeed enjoys paradoxes, and as much as they often frustrate me, I find a sort of beauty in them. Since we are trapped in time, perhaps we cannot fully understand the full beauty of two seemingly contradictory things coexisting in harmony. Choosing to believe in a paradox despite the angry arguments of our inner human logic is perhaps one of the greatest tests and growing pains of faith.
ReplyDeleteI think they are as daunting as they are magnificent sometimes. I think you've nailed it. And even though I find the questions painful, frustrating, or uncomfortable, I find a comfort in them, also.
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