Jim Taylor's Soft Edges

Wednesday November 15, 2006

I'm mad at God.
        I have felt that way a few times before. When our son died. When the fertilized cells implanted in our daughter's womb withered, one by one. When on television I see a fly crawl across the open eyeball of an emaciated African infant too weak to blink.
        And now when a young woman we know, just 26 years old, is diagnosed with cancer. Nodes on her pancreas, her liver, her kidneys. Inoperable. Incurable. Chemotherapy might delay the inevitable – it cannot avert it.
        I want to know, what kind of God deliberately inflicts pain and suffering?
        I'll tell you -- the kind of God I thought I had outgrown. The kind of God who plays favourites, manipulating natural events for those who know the right passwords.

Changing perceptions
        I no longer expect the universe to revolve around me. I remind myself that I'm just one cog in the great machine of life – in Shakespeare's words, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It's not what happens to me, or my family or friends, that matters, I tell myself – it's what happens to humanity as a whole, to the planet…
        I no longer think of God as an omnipotent puppeteer-in-the-sky, twitching strings to make us dance.
        Indeed, I reject the idea of a God who intervenes arbitrarily in natural events.
        But when tragedies strike, I still rail at God as if God were personally responsible.
        And so I'm as furious with myself as with God. Because I find that I still carry around within me, deep down, a distorted understanding of God that I resent and reject.

Empathetic God
        The words used by the late William Sloane Coffin in a eulogy for his son Alex resonate with me:

A kind woman came into the house carrying about 18 quiches, saying sadly, "I just don't understand the will of God."
        I exploded: "I'll say you don't, lady. Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper, that he was probably driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of beers too many? Do you think it is God's will that there are no streetlights on that road and no guardrail separating that right-angle turn from Boston Harbor?"
        Nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn't go around this world with his finger on triggers, his fist on knives, his hands on steering wheels… When the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break.

        I can and do worship Coffin's empathetic God. But I cannot, I will not, worship a God who inflicts pain, suffering, and death – randomly or selectively.
        I intend to rid myself of that entrenched perception of God. But I can see it may take longer than I had expected.

Jim Taylor