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Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The Big Question

A little reflection on recent news, skip this post if you don't want to think about anything too heavy today.

Last night, we had some weather in these parts. The damage wasn't so bad in Texas, but up near Ardmore, Oklahoma, a couple hours north of Dallas, 8 people were killed by a tornado and more than that injured. Even though we're used to bad storms around here, still, every time you hear about so many lives snuffed out - boom - just like that, you realize it could have been you just as easy. Why them, not me? Why anyone at all?

An even worse case: the nearly 200 people burned up in a flash by the horrible wildfires down in Australia. Most had no idea how close the danger was until it was on top of them, fire dropping out of the sky, a wall of flames 4 stories high, trees and cars exploding, entire towns and their populations burned to a cinder - nowhere to run, no way to escape. Just nauseating.

Again, regardless of whether it was caused by arson or lightning or whatever, the question arises in your heart: why did this have to happen, such a horrible death, so many people, children, old folks, disabled people, whole families? When something bad happens to one person, you console yourself with thinking, well he was just unlucky. But so many people at one time - why?

Where is God when things like this happen? I don't believe God causes bad things to happen to anyone - that would be a demon, not a god. But such huge catastrophes make you question, even against your will, the whole concept of a kindly Providence watching over things, listening to your prayers to protect your loved ones.

Of course, we can pile up many, many examples of disaster and death. There was the tsunami in the Indian Ocean just a few years ago, when thousands died in many countries. And before that, who can forget the sudden shock of 9/11? All those thousands of ordinary, everyday people, going about the normal routines of life on a blue-sky Tuesday morning - suddenly gone. And we can go on back and back through the decades and the centuries, counting the sudden, inescapable tragedies of millions.

Why?

And then there are the uncountable individual tragedies, such as each one of us is intimately familiar with. Bad things that happen for no particular reason, wounds unhealed that scar the soul and turn your life down a path you would not have chosen to go.

Why?

I don't know. Nobody else does either. The great minds of theology and philosophy have exercised all their finest talents on figuring out the problem of evil; and lots have come up with answers, but none of them are satisfactory as far as I can see.

There is no answer to that why; not in this life. Things just are the way they are. After a lot of reading, thinking, praying, and living, that's the best I can come up with.

But against all of that, we have to weigh the occurrences of unforeseen, unexplainable good. Times when blessings come, perhaps in answer to prayer, perhaps even before you knew you needed it. And those rare, very rare times in each person's life when some little miracle - and a miracle when it happens is the most ordinary-seeming thing in the world - some little act of Providence does occur, and leaves you stupefied with awe and gratitude.

So does it all balance out eventually? Some people seem to have all the good things in this life; others seem fated never to have much at all. And some get it all snatched away from them, and not through any fault of their own.

Why? I don't know. But I have to believe that somewhere, beyond space and time, it all does get balanced out, and the good outweighs all the bad. Lots of religions - not to mention lots of self-proclaimed messiahs - can give you all kinds of details on the when, where and how of this; but I don't trust any of them. We just aren't there yet. But we all will be, one day.

Atheism is very ultra-fashionable right now in some circles - which to my mind is like the current vogue of ladies' heel-less pumps. Silly and utterly impractical; a show-off thing to demonstrate oh-look-how-cool-I-am.

Because to believe that there is no place and time of balancing out, as I've put it here, trying to avoid traditional religious terminology, no moment, no place beyond this mortal life where all the wrongs of the world are made right, somehow, some way - well, the alternative is to believe that we are all simply road kill. Nothing more.

But just look at the person you love most dearly and try to hold that thought at the front of your mind. Or look at your own hand, warm and familiar, sitting there holding the mouse as you scroll down this page; one day that will be the hand of a skeleton, and you know it, but none of us can bear to hold that thought very long; nor can we bear to say truly that there is no point to it. No point to me.

I believe there is a point, and that point is ultimately good. More than that I can't say. And I don't trust anybody who says any more than that. All I know is that faith and love lead the way to that point, and that's enough. It has to be.

If you don't have faith, work on love.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have no insight as to the WHY, but I do notice that for me, bad things tend to come in clusters. Like today, I discovered my landline is totally dead (I have DSL, which requires a landline), for no apparent reason. Then, shortly after I borrowed a neighbor's line my computer got the Blue Screen of Death (some error message about "missing or corrupt CONFIG\SYSTEM" -- which might as well have been written in Lithuanian, because I have no idea what it means or what to do about it). I went for a walk, to settle my head, during which I ran into a favorite neighbor who informed me that he and his wife have split up (very sad). I came home & spent a lot of the evening resurrecting an old computer which is currently working (but I don't trust it). Then after dinner I was chewing on some papaya tablets (very soft, they dissolve) and felt "crunch" -- a large section of a molar has suddenly disappeared. And the day isn't over yet.

Fortunately, none of these was (so far) life threatening, I'm just noting that they tend to cluster together.

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