Sympathy for the creator: when we encounter suffering, destruction, and death, God, too, suffers. perhaps it's time to comfort as well by renewing our faith and love and working together with the creator.
It was a summer day. I was 5 or 6 years old, no older. I was running fast down a sidewalk in our neighborhood, heading for home, when I stumbled and fell, my bare knees skidding on the cement. Sitting on the sidewalk, crying and holding my bleeding knees, I remember uttering in bewilderment and anger, "Why did God make me fall? Why did he make me tall?" This is a startlingly clear memory, a signal moment that stands out in my recollection of past experiences. If you and I were in that neighborhood now, I could show you the exact spot where I fell.What was the concept of God I had at this young age that initiated such a question? Where had that concept come from? Without then knowing the words omniscient or omnipotent or predestination, the message I had received from the religious teachers around me, from hymns and songs and certain Bible stories, from hearing comments made by adults during times of death and tragedy was that God was a hugely powerful, perfect creature, both fearsome and loving, who had created everything in the world, was present everywhere, aware of everything and controlling all past history and future events, and who operated with purposes often mysterious to human beings. I wouldn't have used those words at 5 or 6 years old, but this was the concept I had incorporated into my attempts to understand the way the world operated.
That question, "Why did God make me fall?" has at its heart issues many of us are still struggling with. Where is God in our sufferings and in the sufferings of others? I come back to the issue again and again. Why should pain, suffering, evil, and violent destruction exist in a world created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and perfect God? How is this seeming contradiction to be resolved?
It is important to me to possess a vision of divinity that does not contradict our reason or our understanding of the universe today. While that vision will always require faith and an openness to the spiritual, it will only be weakened if it conflicts with our contemporary understanding of the physical world, an understanding that influences the way we define ourselves and upon which we base many decisions in our daily lives.
All definitions of God in all cultures in the past have been in union with their cosmologies. Our cosmology, our story of the physical universe, tells us that the earth in its long history has passed through many stages--large ice fields advancing from the poles and retreating, ocean levels rising and falling. From the fossil record we can trace the appearance and the extinction of thousands of species.
We know that the continental land masses drift on tectonic plates and that mountains form from pressures on the land when these plates meet. We have geologic evidence of catastrophic events that occurred on earth before the existence of humans, collisions with meteors and asteroids that caused massive explosions resulting in drastic changes in the earth's atmosphere. We can locate the craters left by these collisions.
Not long ago, I stood in Arizona on the high, dusty rim of such a crater, the result of a meteor striking earth 50,000 years ago with the explosive force of 20 million tons of TNT. People standing on the opposite rim of this shockingly deep and gaping depression in the land looked very small. Today we realize that we are immersed in a vast array of cosmic events and that at this moment stars in the heavens are being born and stars are dying. All the physical phenomena we witness are in flux and change.
Where is God in this physical universe of constant changes, changes that often cause suffering and the deaths of humans and Other life on earth? Where is God in the destruction caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions? Where was God in the sufferings of the many, many children who died in the past from diseases like cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, small pox, malaria, polio, scarlet fever?
I went with my mother once to visit a very young girl dying of leukemia. She looked small and vulnerable lying in a large bed set up for her in the living room of her home. I thought she was beautiful. And as I remember it now, everything around her was white except for a grey kitten playing on the bed beside her. Her mother had a quiet, cordial manner. She was wearing a plain house dress of the type worn by women in the 1940s. She was an ordinary woman, except for the expression of pain on her face, the deep grief in her eyes.
The attempt to justify suffering, of the innocent especially, generally requires accepting either the conclusion that the human species deserves to suffer or that the ways of an omnipotent God are simply a mystery to humankind and that it is a matter of faith to believe that suffering results in some good, if we could only understand it.
Neither conclusion is satisfying to me. Each implies that an all-powerful, all-good God is either causing or allowing the suffering of innocents to occur. If medical science had accepted either of these conclusions, none of the discoveries of modern medicine that have saved lives and relieved suffering would have taken place.
I believe in a creative power that is the source of all beauty and energy and goodness in the universe. I believe this power is divine and benevolent and longs for us and needs us. Rare and unpredictable moments come occasionally that convince me of this. A few evenings ago I was standing outside alone, surrounded by a warm, easy wind in the autumn trees, the constant insistence of crickets, the call of a night bird. A dog was barking far away. Even the light of the moon seemed to me a significant sound. And in that moment, I was certain that a benevolent presence in the universe lingers expectantly, yearning for us as a mother might yearn for her child's first word, as a mother might yearn for her daughter's life.
I believe the divine power and the universe both are in the process of coming fully into being. The physical universe is in constant change. Its creation is not finished. It is still roiling and trembling, shuddering and exploding, alive with slow and steady change. Suffering and death are often the results of this necessary ongoing creative process. And we are not complete. Divinity, as manifested in the universe, is not complete. It also is in the process of moving toward its magnificent and fully realized existence. By our actions and our faith, we may play a role in the direction the evolution of the universe and the power within it take.
We have witnessed in the rise of living forms on earth, cocreation occurring over time. This is particularly evident in the development of flowering plants and their pollinators, each needing the other for survival, influencing the physical form of each other, both rising together simultaneously. Consider how perfectly bees and the wild flowers of their regions require and serve each other. They didn't accidentally find each other one day. Each has survived by modifying and determining the form and life habits of the other.
Cocreation is also evident in the development of the human thumb and the brain. The more the thumb was used by early humans, the larger the portion of the brain became devoted to its manipulation, thus the more adept the thumb became, the more it was used, and so on. The hands and the brain influencing each other gradually became capable of holding a cup, bandaging a wound, threading a needle, building an arch, grinding the lens of a telescope, fashioning a violin, drawing the bow, fingers on the strings, engaging the heart.
Maybe cocreation is the way it is with humans and divinity, each shaping and influencing the strength and presence of the other, an ongoing cocreation. The Bible speaks often of a covenant between God and people. A covenant involves promises made between two parties, each needing the other, each agreeing to fulfill certain obligations to the benefit of the other. I believe the power of divinity is enhanced, becomes actualized, as we recognize its presence and express its being. We, in turn, are altered, filled with energy and strength and beneficence during the process of that recognition.
Believing that the divine power and human beings act as cocreators pleases me, because it does not separate the divine from the ways of the physical universe as we understand them today, and because it does not lead to blaming God for suffering or to the futile question of why an omnipotent God should "allow" or "cause" the suffering of innocents. It does not present God as a master puppeteer controlling all the strings of the universe. It enables me to be in sympathy with the creative power, to feel that what I do and say may matter to the future development of the universe and the fulfillment of divinity.
In the poem "The Possible Suffering of a God During Creation," I express compassion for the creator, suggesting that God too feels grief for the suffering "that the duration/of the creation must, of necessity, demand ..."
... How can he tolerate knowing There is nothing else here on earth as bright and salty As blood spilled in the open? Maybe he wakes periodically at night, Wiping away the tears he doesn't know He has cried in his sleep, not having had time yet to tell Himself precisely how it is he must mourn, not having had time yet To elicit from his creation its invention Of his own solace.
We may be the means by which the universe comes to love and console itself. These thoughts imply obligations undertaken willingly and gladly, because we understand that we are living in a world that is not finished. As suffering and death and evil are the results of this necessary ongoing creative process, so also are life and all that sustains us--summer swimming in slow, grandfather rivers, early-morning grasses firey with frost, rakes and hoes, gardens and garden gates, workers on the roof singing in the hot sun (I heard them this afternoon), slapstick, all moments of serenity, all moments of bliss.
We comfort each other during times of suffering and grief, uncertainty and fear. All of us in this country have experienced these emotions very recently. When humans commit violent acts against one another, the divine presence in the universe suffers. Divinity is wounded. Perhaps it is necessary in times like these to comfort God also, by expressing our continuing faith, by praising life, by struggling to deal with complicated and dangerous situations in the best ways we can understand, by helping and loving each other and the world. God, too, so loves the world.
We work to fulfill the obligations placed on us as creatures aware of ourselves and aware of the existence of the physical world and the divinity within that world. We know we are working together with the divine power. It is leading as we are leading. It is the source of compassion and forgiveness as we are the agents of compassion and forgiveness. We are infused with divinity ourselves, multiplying the place and power of divinity, as we discover, express, and extol its presence in the universe.
PATTIANN ROGERS is a poet who lives in Colorado. Her most recent book is Song of the World Becoming: Poems, New and Collected, 1981-2001 (Milkweed Editions, 2001).
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Rogers, Pattiann |
|---|---|
| Publication: | U.S. Catholic |
| Date: | Dec 1, 2001 |
| Words: | 1943 |
| Previous Article: | Buy now, pay later: why buying more stuff now won't help us build a more stable future. (margin notes). |
| Next Article: | Truth and consequences: past or present, just what makes a martyr? |
| Topics: | |