People have posed the question: if there is a good God, why is there suffering?
I never had much to say about that. It was sort of a mystery that I couldn't get to the bottom of.
Recently - as recent as yesterday morning, to be exact - I was sitting down to write something. Ruth had posted a post that mentioned "the world in a cup", accompanied by a picture of an egg in a Spode teacup.
http://ruthie822.blogspot.com/2009/03/technology-overload-vs-world-in-cup.html
I wrote the title "Universe"
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/03/universe.html
and was thinking along the lines of world in a cup, universe in a grain of sand type of line of thought, and I came up with something surprising...or something surprising came along and decided to pop in, actually.
If you read it - and you must, for I shall not synopsize it - it came out that we do not suffer from God's Creation; we suffer with it. Or we should realize that as we suffer, we are suffering with all the universe in community.
So it is not a matter of whether God allows suffering.
Suffering and pain are; they exist. There is at least the pain of Change. If there were no Change - if God forbade Change - this pain would disappear, but at what cost? We would be as immobile and inflexible and as unchanging as the mountains. Do Mountains kiss their offspring goodnight?
And all Creation suffers.
Ah, but does God suffer? you ask. He puts Himself in a special position to observe the suffering of what He has created...in a sense, allowing its continuance.
However, we learned that God's Son died for us.
Therefore, God feels that pain, and suffers in community with us.
(An atheist objected that God created all things; suffering exists; therefore God created it.
At this point I think we would do well to look at the Lord Buddha's critique of pain,or dukha. The logic of Buddhism and its metaphysic can be very illuminating. More later.)
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3 comments:
Can't say I disagree. This is akin to the transforming thought I got about God some years ago. Always was taught he was unchanging, always the same. Well, think: if he created humans with free will--an essential notion if we're to believe that God and religion make any sense at all--then he himself is prisoner to that will in humans. In other words, he must adjust to the results of the decisions humans make, i.e., he himself must change. Not a far leap from linking this idea with the fact that God is in all the suffering also.
Agree totally.
Our Super-Duper-Codes that we call Language and Rationality seems to be totally unsuited to discussing the divine.
That's why we end up with: may God create a wheel of cheese (gruyere) so big that he cannot lift it?
I am quite convinced there are other codes we use and they are superior to Language.
However, they do not employ language....so they appear to us to be mute!! So we dismiss them.
Language follows it own rules. So does love: our emotions are not chaotic and random, they have their own "grammar".
Imaging has its own "logic" and "gramnmar". So does Music. So does learned structured activity - like basketball.
I may watch a great autumn spectacular of University of Michigan (rah!) versus Ohio State (sort of rah!) and derive more inspiration and humanity from it that all the sermons preached from every pulpit in the land!
Once again....you get me on lines of thought I really should devote a book to, because there is so much in what you speak of, that I just seem to wander all over.
Thanks.
Happy to have provided some sort of cranial stimulation. Just in reading this response I'm reminded of how inadequate anything we can speak or write is to the notion of God. The language of music probably comes closer to capturing a whiff of the Divine than anything else. Certainly the formulations of theologians are way, way down the list.
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