Harold and Tom
After his son Aaron died at fourteen of progeria, the rapid-aging disease, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote When Bad Things Happen To Good People. The book has been an immense help and encouragement to many people, including to me in the development, evolution of my own personal theologies about God, creation, the universe and possibilities of multiverses, prayer, praise, liturgy, worship. Harold came and spoke to us -- ministers, ordination candidates, physicians, medical students and interns -- at Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Pennsylvania during my time of Clinical Pastoral Education there some thirty years ago. By then he was well known as a best-selling author, much in demand as a lecturer and leader of seminars around the country, no doubt a very wealthy man. The day he was with us at Hershey, I sat in the small auditorium with him and heard him say, “All I want is my son back.”
We have wonderful stories in the Bible, New Testament and Old, about God’s creating powers, God’s healing, God’s loving will for those in whom God is well pleased. Jesus heals many diseases, restores sight, hearing, speech, mobility. Through Elijah, Elisha and Jesus, God even raises children from death. We may have a sense of prayer answered as friends and loved ones recover from illnesses of all kinds. As we minister and pray with those who are dying, and die, and with their devastated loved ones, we wonder why God did not, does not, step in and say, “Talitha, koum.” So many times, the thought has been with me of trying just that before a casket was closed forever, try it, say it and put God on the spot: will You or won’t You, can You or can’t You? Koum.
In the book, Rabbi Kushner talks about characteristics of God that we commonly think of, that God is all loving and all powerful. The problem of theodicy, i.e., “If God exists and is omnipotent, why does God permit terrible things to happen to us?” has driven many, many people away from God to agnosticism (do not, cannot know) or atheism (no God); but Kushner finds differently. First, his book is titled “When Bad Things Happen To Good People,” NOT “Why Bad Things Happen To Good People,” because as Harold says, we do not know why, and there is no answer; so, we needn’t seek and search and try to figure out why this happened, expecting answers. Second, and more helpful to me as a theologically-oriented person, Kushner suggests that as to God being both all powerful and all loving, our experience is that it simply is not so; and he says that if he must choose either all powerful or all loving for his God, he chooses all loving. I must say, that Harold and Tom are not far apart here.
In class at seminary, we read a little book (I can’t find the book in my library, nor do I remember its title or author) in which the author posits that God’s one characteristic is Grace. Grace: unconditional love. This God, whom I experience in Jesus Christ, is good enough, powerful enough for me. I have not experienced, and cannot and do not expect, God to heal me or those I love in cases of terminal illness (though I will not deny the occasional unexplainable, and will join with others in rejoicing), or to raise from death. I can and do believe this loving God is present and encouraging as we humans advance, evolve in discovery, knowledge, ability, reason, skill of science, medicine, physics, cosmology, theology, humanity. I hold to the tenet of our Baptismal Covenant that asks, “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons,” believing that Christ is there to be found.
Unlike many whom I know and love, I do not accept what I regard as escapist and overly simplistic wisdom that “sometimes God says NO.” The idea that “sometimes God says NO” seems incompatible with Grace; and begs the question, desperately avoids the experience, the evidence, that no one is there. I believe that God is there, here, present, in, with, around and under -- us.
Two things come to mind. From Teresa of Avila (16th C):
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
Along with his family, I am in the midst of grieving in the dying of a dear friend, whose illness and dying is incomprehensible, unexplainable, indefensible. There have been times over the past two years when, with those who advised Job, I felt tempted to shake my fist at the heavens and cry, "What the hell's the matter with You?" But as I live into this, in my mind is a verse from the Good News Translation of Psalm 116:
How painful it is to the Lord
when one of his people dies!
when one of his people dies!
This is the God in whom I believe; the God I love, and who loves me.
TW+