Sarx

Would the book of Job make sense as the story and questions of a peasant or serf or share-cropper Job? My question comes from visits to churches and development projects in Cuba, El Salvador, Malawi, Ethiopia, and among native peoples in Canada. These visits leave me wondering whether theodicy – the theological and philosophical work of justifying the goodness of God from (or against) our experience of what happens in the world – is the dilemma of privilege, whether comfort and abundance provoke the question. I readily admit I am reflecting from relatively brief visits. Total time spent is more than two months but under three months. Beyond the visits, this question is shaped by my wife’s continuing work in Malawi – so close working relationship and friendships with Malawian church and community leaders and a month-long visit yearly for the past six years. The question has also been reinforced by conversations with friends who have worked in Peace Corps and done extended church work in poverty settings outside the U.S.

I have returned from my visits with these sisters and brothers humbled and inspired by the unexpected but seemingly steady renewal of joy that people can find despite living in extremely simple circumstances and facing loss and tragedy and simple want. So my question is whether the dilemma of theodicy is a luxury or at least a question conditioned by circumstances, something that only becomes askable after an extended experience of plenty? Did the writer of Job need to set Job up as a very rich man who lost everything for the book to be plausible? Is that what it takes to get us to the wrenching (so yes, very real) questions of theodicy?

Saturday I spent the day at the funeral of a man ten years younger than me, a man we’d consider too young to day. In his early fifties his death left behind a profoundly grieving wife and three very good, young sons, all too young to lose a husband and father. It’s easy for me to ask ‘why?’ I listened for it in this day of grieving.

When we arrived in the village there were four hundred people gathered for a family and village-wide grieving. The singing and keening we heard at 10:30 in the had begun the previous sunset.. The widow is one of three regional project directors for NGO that my wife directs. As a pastor, I was stationed among the six African pastors who had gathered to oversee the funeral liturgy that would mark the end of eighteen hours or so of traditional grieving before the procession to graveside for burial. Where the pastors were stationed across the stream in the shade of a neighboring house, visitors came in a steady stream for a formal greeting, a word of blessing, a remembering, just as they circulated through the house where the body was laid out and the widow was surrounded by supporting kin. Everything I heard combined deep sadness at the loss of a good man and gratitude for a life lived well, for a good family, for the ties of family, kinship and community. Though the keening was sharp and intense and a lot of tears flowed, no one asked the question of ‘how could God do this?’ or even ‘how could God allow this?’ The laughter and grateful remembering that I know from a good funeral back home was very much in evidence.

In the past twenty years Malawians have seen a lot of dying. This man had died of complications of diabetes, but AIDS had made funerals of younger adults commonplace. For a couple years most of the cottage furniture makers in the country stopped making furniture to meet the demand for coffins. ARV’s have changed that, though most furniture makers still sell coffins. A research project here that I’ve been privileged to participate in has interviewed national religious leaders, local leaders, and this year grassroots congregants in Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Living Waters (African Pentecostal) and Muslim congregations. Everyone we’ve spoken with has lost an immediate relative to AIDS. (I can literally think of one exception, and I don’t trust that exception’s witness). Let me make this clearer: everyone we’ve interviewed in Malawi has lost a parent, sister or brother or child to AIDS, and many have suffered multiple immediate losses.

This is a country where my not fully conscious American assumptions and experience expected to find depressed pall over every conversation. And from the relentless loss people had experienced, I’d expect to find Malawi a depressing place. It’s not, and in fact it’s the opposite. Malawi calls itself, ‘the warm heart of Africa.’ Along with great resourcefulness and an ease with truthful telling of hard experience, people here are consistently friendly, good-natured, interested in learning, and yes, frequently joyful. Like many American and European visitors, I find this (as I found Cuba, El Salvador, and Ethiopia) places where people seem much clearer about what matters and much more open to joy (and laughter) than back home in the U.S. .

My brief experience of native people in Canada was somewhat different. I sensed a lot of depression there, but still heard relatively little of the question of where God was or how God could have allowed the people’s suffering. In that setting the question was Christians addressing their church and fellow Christians – how could the church have allowed this to happen? And do YOU care?

On reflection I observe a startlingly consistent spiritual practice here (obviously not in every person, but so frequent as to feel familiar) – people choose to live gratefully. Yesterday talking to a 39 year old divorced village woman with five children, HIV positive with AIDS diagnosis and finally in treatment for TB (which had to be controlled before she could go on ARV’s), she was talking about how grateful she was to be feeling better.

Can we ask the question of theodicy without getting entangled in assumptions about what we ‘deserve?’ Malawians seem to take whatever happens in a neutral way – fatalism is what some people would call it. If good things come my way, I should be thankful and seek the way to share my good fortune with family and friends. I use the the non-theological term ‘fortune’ deliberately. God shows up in conversation a lot in people’s conversation, but not ‘doing things’ to people or circumstances. More typically God’s ‘doing’ seems to be in making things work out, giving blessing when everything looks hopeless, mitigating disaster in a surprising way, or offering comfort and presence even when loss is complete. It’s not quite a cosmic battle between fate and God, but there is something of such a struggle (and an interpretation and experience that keeps finding God winning out) shaping what people see, feel and say about what happens.

I think it was in Archibald MacLeish’s play J.B., his telling of Job’s story, that I first encountered the riddle,
If God is good, he is not God
If God is God, he is not good.
The assumptions of the riddle and of the classic form of theodicy are a series of all- attributes of God, so all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. Actually better than all-good would be all-loving – that puts a face on the dilemma because it’s not hard to imagine some abstract ‘good’ that is incomprehensible to us. ‘Behind a frowning providence, God hides a smiling face,’ as William Cowper put it in his beautiful, but not fully satisfying hymn.

My glimpse of the spirituality of Third World Christians is my bigger contribution to this discussion, I think, but I’ll also try (more lightly) to take on the question itself, to face it directly.

There’s a hint of another way of formulating the question in the Lord’s Prayer,
‘Your Kingdom Come,
Your will be done and earth as (or ‘and’) in heaven.’
Whatever we are praying for there is, the prayer assumes, not yet so. God’s reign and the full expression of God’s only appear when all the cards are played, when life (and our shared life together) are viewed whole at the end. Meanwhile, there’s some kind of struggle or becoming going on. God’s not done, making something beautiful and holy and God, but not finished (or perhaps fighting a battle that’s not won, but I prefer the creating imagery).

Creators (and creative artists) seem to be driven by a dis-satisfaction, an itch to see something not yet revealed, to touch something never touched before, to speak a previously unspoken word. And creators keep creating because successive iterations of their work get closer to vision and never quite make it. Is God that kind of creator? I think maybe so.

Origen offered the startling suggestion that God created (or is creating) no more world than God could ultimately manage. To me that makes much more sense as the image of a real creative artist than the dilemmas of an all-powerful divine CEO in an infallible command and control administrative chain of command. An all-loving creator and a work in process seems more or less consistent with the Third World spirituality of accepting what comes (from whatever mysterious source) and looking again and again for the face and hand of the one who loves us wherever grace comes to disaster (or good circumstances for that matter).

When I was working in Idaho thirty years ago, Robert Chalker, an Old Testament professor at the College of Idaho (Presbyterian) told me that in the religion of the Hebrew prophets, idolatry wasn’t defined by the images people bowed to, but by a theology and spirituality that offered a means to manipulate God for our own purposes. Idolatry is the religion of manageable results, and Chalker said, ‘The prophets never stop reminding us that the worship of YHWH’ can be just as idolatrous as the worship of Baal.’ Whether it’s on our own behalf, or for the sake of love or compassion for others, the troubling experience that produces questions of theodicy seems to be, ‘Why couldn’t God do better for me (or for this person or group of people)?” What if God is always giving us God’s best? That seems to be Origen’s answer to the question and Origen’s response runs parallel to Chalker’s question of exactly what we want from God and what we think we can or should do to get God to give us what we want.

I’m coming to the loose ends part of my musings, but can’t close without remember a gem from my recent pilgrims’ walk in Spain. We were twelve, eleven Episcopalians (three of them clergy) and one wonderful Lutheran pastor. Together we walked a hundred fifty miles to Santiago de Compostela in Spain in two weeks. Jay Gaskill, one of our pilgrim band, is a public defender of many years experience. Jay also happens to be a very well-read amateur theologian (his real lifetime work he says) with a solid lifetime’s reflection, much of it from time spent with people who have suffered or inflicted serious suffering.

By the second or third day of our walking pains and blisters began to appear in our group. People were reflecting together with surprise that they could enjoy walking when it hurt, ached, and even when, the moment before, it seemed impossible. In our morning’s shared reflection before the next day began, Jay said that the grace of Christian faith is that we teach (more clearly perhaps than any other religion) that God suffers with us and that God’s suffering alongside us tells us the biggest truth of who God is. No answer there about ‘why’ God does anything, but the most valuable assurance about WHERE God is when we or anyone faces suffering.

That was going to be my final word, but I closed down and had some more time and more reflection before sending, and it made me smile to think I was quoting a defense attorney – an advocate – at the end of this. It isn’t no suffering that Jesus promises, nor is it understanding the ways of God. Jesus promises us an Advocate, a Spirit of Truth and Comforter. I know that doesn’t solve the problem, but as far as I can tell, it’s the last word we get on the edge of awe and mystery. Suffering may not be God’s will at all, but we’re not alone as we suffer. So, having invoked a criminal defense attorney and the Holy Spirit, I think it’s time to rest my case.

Donald

The Rev. Donald Schell, co-founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is Creative Director of All Saints Company, working for community development in congregational life focusing on sharing leadership, welcoming creativity, building community through music, and making liturgical architecture a win/win for building and congregation.