Grabbing Water

 

It must be obvious… that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. -- Alan Watts 

I came across a video recent entitled "Before Birth: Why a Soul Chooses Addiction." You can watch it for yourself by following this link. It's about 15 minutes long.

It attempts to answer the question, "Why do bad things happen to people?" I come from a world of control. My job as an engineer is built on the premise that the world is like a machine and we can manipulate it as we choose. And it's not entirely inaccurate. If I couldn't control electricity, bending it to represent information and then manipulating that information to some end result, I wouldn't have a job.

So it is with our western scientific world. We have experiments and formulas that describe reality. We can do drug trials to develop medicines that affect and manipulate the human body. We can create machines that shuttle us to and fro across the entire planet. We can harness invisible forces that allow us to see and hear things that were created decades before in places we've never set foot in. For all intents and purposes, we create the illusion that we have mastered the physical world, becoming gods of creation.

But that's not entirely true. We don't have complete control of everything. Bad things can still happen. People are unpredictable and do and say things we would rather have them not. And when this happens we are left with the question "why?" Why is the world unfair? Why is there injustice? Why is there suffering? Why, why Why?

Many traditions have tried to answer that question. Religions and philosophies all make their attempts. Some resonate better with some folks. Some, not so much. I thought I had a pretty good answer from my upbringing. The problem is sin. God created the world perfect and humanity messed it up. And now we're trying to fix it. But the only one who can fix it is God, so we have to turn to Him.

It's an answer. One that I held for the first 30 years of my life. And then my daughter died and I was left with the question, "why?" I had faith. I had people praying. And yet, she still died. Did I do something wrong? Did I not say the right prayer or have the right faith? And then shame starts to creep in. Maybe the problem is me and if I were different somehow, things would have worked out.

My faith deconstruction forced me to answer that question. I won't pretend to say that I have a definitive answer - that would be arrogant and untrue. But I do have thoughts.

First, when one confronts the problem of evil, or "badness," one has to ask the first question: what is evil? How does one define it?

There are many ways to define evil. The Oxford dictionary defines evil as "profoundly immoral and wicked". And what does immoral mean? "Not conforming to accepted standards of morality." And what is morality? "Principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior."

So it seems that evil is behaving in a way that doesn't conform to accepted standards of right and wrong. There was no behavior concerning my daughter's loss of life. It just... happened. There was no ill will or action by anyone. It's just what happens to babies sometimes.

But the statement "it just happens" rings hollow. Some babies have the same necrotizing enterocolitis and survive. Why were they okay? We could pull out the medical charts and try to assess what the differences are. Science may even get us to a point where we have such control over the human body that we can prevent all disease. And still, that doesn't bring my daughter back.

I think sometimes the question "why" isn't a search for information, but a search for comfort. When bad things happen, we want answers because we want to know if things will be okay.

This where faith steps in. In my deconstruction, I asked the question if God exists. Truthfully, I think this question is for the heart, not the mind.

I love a good atheist versus apologist debate. Two smart people flexing on each other. But ultimately, I think there are two ideas. You either believe in God and find reasons why or don't believe in God and find reasons why not. Believe in God is more intuition than intellect. You have an inkling that it's true.

The one thing I could never abandon was hope. Hope that death is not the end. Hope that I would meet my daughter some day in some other way. Hope that all the pain of this life had some purpose to it.

I had to tease apart two concepts that were mashed together. Number one is: God is real. Number two is: the church knows who God is. It took many, MANY years of sitting and untangling those two things. I'm still working through it and will probably be for the rest of my life. But that's okay, because if you think you can understand the totality of God and the Divine, your vision is too small.

One thing that makes me sad today is that loud voices crowd out small ones. There's a quote by Brenan Manning, an ex-Catholic priest:

"The single greatest cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and go out and deny him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable."

I've been there. On both sides. I've been on the giving end of spiritual arrogance and pride and I've been on the receiving end. And it sucks. It's hard to not take it personally when someone thinks you're going hell because of... whatever. A belief, a characteristic, some way you choose to live your life. It doesn't matter. You can feel someone's disdain for you.

I wish this place was more empathetic. I'm reading a book by Laura Lynn Jackson, a psychic who claims she can see people's emotions as color (synesthesia, look it up). That would be an awesome ability. To be able to visibly see people's moods. Some of us are blessed with the ability to feel with people and some of us are not. And those of us who are not tend to be bulls in china shops, making a mess of everything.

What we really need is grace and courage. If we can hold the view that we are all works in progress and need a little time to get it together, the world would become a much more compassionate place. But, as it stands, we all get obsessed with control and power. The other guys are evil and we are righteous and we need to fight against evil and injustice. And all that does is create a pendulum that swings back and forth between two teams.

I've been on that see-saw too many times and I'm ready to get off. To do something different. To be something different.

Jesus said, "Whatever you do to the least, you do to me." If we want to make the world a more compassionate place, we have to be compassionate to the least. But here's the thing. The least is not a fixed category. It's not just the least in terms of societal status. It's not just the poor or the marginalized. It's whoever you deem having the least value. For some, the least includes presidents and billionaires. Certain political parties or religious groups.

If you withhold compassion from anyone, you are making the world a less compassionate place. Compassionate isn't being a doormat. Compassion first begins with the self. You must love yourself before loving your neighbor, otherwise you are using them as a tool to elevate your self-worth. You must have healthy boundaries and the courage to say no. But, and I think we can feel when we slip out of it, you can still say no and wish the best for a person. You can still love a person while giving then space to sort out whatever they need to sort out. When we can't fix, we can hold space.

We can be a people of control, tightly holding on to our notions of what's fair and just, or we can be a people of flow, holding things loosely and never grasping for an outcome. Loose hands hold more water than clenched fists.

Up 1.1 pounds.