It's the problem of Pain, Mom


 


This was brought about by my chewing over the book, the Question of God . Like everybody else who's ever thought about the nature (if any) of God, and like anybody who's ever lost a father or otherwise been bodyslammed by misfortune, the problem of suffering sits there like a Bell's Theorem of theology:
1. If there is a God, and
2. If God is omnipotent, and
3. If God is omniscient, and
4. If God loves us, then
4. Why do such horrible things happen to us?

For some, it's the best argument against the existence of God. It has destroyed the faith of many devout people; others, it turns their minds into the strangest of knots. (The Buddha based his entire spiritual discourse on the problem of suffering--and you will look in vain for a mention of a God in his works.) It's not only hard and unyielding, it holds out pain on one side and our fears on the other.

So of course I, mister ex-comic-book-writer-can't-get-arrested is going to tackle it. Overweening a bit, aren't we?

Except I think I'm on to something.

1. He Had A Football Helmet

How is it possible that a good God, and one who loves us, does such horrible things to us? Tsunamis, volcanoes, painful and disfiguring diseases, wars, random violence--and at the half-exposed core, a world in which everyone dies?
The traditional Christian religious explanations are usually a combination of two factors: 1) it's really not so bad, and 2) it's really our fault. Either the world's a testing ground or we are depraved beings who deserve nothing better. The first, though, mocks our pain, while the second mocks our sense of justice. A little girl burns to death, in agony, from a white phosphorous grenade. What test is she undergoing? What was her misdeed that she's punished thus?

Okay, all right, granted, but what is wanted here? It's all very well to piss and moan, but you got an alternative?
The joke goes like this:
A woman was walking by the seashore with her little boy, and suddenly an enormous wave comes out and sweeps the little boy away into the sea.
The woman, grief stricken, falls to her knees and prays to God, "please, O Lord, he's the love of my life, and has never done anything to deserve this! I have been a faithful believer all my life, Lord! Please, don't do this to me!"
And suddenly another enormous wave rises up and deposits the little boy in front of her, alive and unharmed.
And the woman turns her eyes to heaven and says, "He had a hat!"

Is our protest that misfortune happens to us at all? Is what we want from God, well, what we want? That reduces to what I call the Texas football problem: Two towns in Texas, both full of devoted Christians, both getting down on their knees en masse (so to speak), praying for victory in tomorrow's game. Now, I ask you, what's a deity to do? Inescapably, He's going disappoint and bring pain to a whole town full of people, of His devoted faithful. It's as hopeless a situation as the one with the rock so big He can't lift it.

It's almost insulting to compare a football game with a WP grenade. But it forces the question, is our problem one of degree? Is football OK? Is leprosy not OK? Is your husband leaving you OK? Is multiple sclerosis not OK? Is financial ruin OK? Is a broken spine not OK?
Are the Nuremberg Laws OK? Is the Holocaust not OK?
If we go too far in that direction, our sense of justice starts fighting a horrible absurd battle with our pain. Can we creep along the scale from the lost football game until we stop and say, "All right, stop! Arthritis and a broken hip is enough. Any more and I stop believing in you"?

2. Thanks, Dad. It's Just What I Needed.

The answer, angrily given because it seems a stupid piece of chop-logic, there's a difference between a blow that we get over, and a blast that cripples, that wrecks, that disfigures a life permanently. Of course. the fact that a hurricane destroys your life and your the business you spent years building, and you built a new career, doesn't make the hurricane OK, or the fact that you triumphed over ALS to become the world's most renowned physicist doesn't make the disease something to be thankful for. The Goodness of God shouldn't be dependent on our efforts, should it?

But there's the other side to that thought that adds something. Something from an unexpected quarter.

The fact is that all pain is finite. And all misfortune is something we get over.

My life has been fortunately free of serious disease and life-shattering disasters. But, as it comes to everyone, the death of my father came to me, and tore parts of me I didn't know could be torn. i never thought I'd ever be a person who would burst into tears while driving to work, but I became that person.
But the other thing that happened to me was that , even as someone terribly, terribly afraid of my own death, my father dying changed the way I felt about it. No, I didn't get any assurance of an afterlife; no, I didn't gain a new conception of the way the universe worked. But death, which had been this terrifying infinite abstract dread, became a real thing to me. Still a great unknown and a calling into question of all that I am (Like, yes or No?), my father's death was now a part of me as much as my first girlfriend or my first glass of whiskey was. I'm still scared--dreadfully scared--but I can no longer turn away from it. I don't want to.
My father gave me the gift of Death.

And even if death is not the gateway to an afterlife, even if it ends it all, it (as the stoics and more dismal ancients delighted in reminding us) (not to mention Omar Khayyam) Death is the end of pain, of sorrow, of failure, of bewilderment, of despair, of doubt, of unfulfilled potential.

Repeat after me, everybody: "Gee! Thanks a lot!"

But that's what got me thinking.

3. Kiss it and make it better


In Stanislaw Lem's Solaris , he posits this sentient planetwide ocean possessed of a sort of intelligence that doesn't even recognize the human consciousness (it being to small and blurry) but focuses on the matrix of desires, fears and dreams and makes them manifest. So it doesn't talk to the protagonist--but it does materialize his ex-lover (IIRC. It's been a while.) Add doses of Freud and Jung, and the question pops up again in this post: is what we want what we want?

Okay, to the point.

You've been beaten up and publicly humiliated in the playground by the school bully. In pain, in tears, you hurry home. There to greet you is your father.
What do you want of him?
You want him to beat up the bully in turn, or speak to the other father, and get him into a world of trouble. You want him to fix the situation.

You hurry home. There to greet you is your mother. You want her to wrap you in her arms and hold you close. You want her to kiss the scrapes and make them better.
You want her to take away the pain.

Now suppose that, standing in the world of pain, you are asking for the Daddy's solution--but what God has to give you is Mommy's gift?

Here's the way the dialogue goes:

I: I hurt. Oh God, I hurt! Please! please, I hurt so much!
G: I can give it to you. Come to me.
I: What do you mean, come to you?
G: Come here. I can give you an end to all your pain.
I:Uh--What exactly are we talking about here?
G: What you asked for. An end to your pain. Here. in my arms.
I: Wait, wait. I'd really rather sort of stay here. You know, like not actually die or anything.
G: So you'd rather keep the pain. The world is full of it, you know.
I: Actually, yes, come to think of it. Just not quite so much, if you could manage to do that. Er--could you?

(G: Catherine Deneuve. I: Michael Palin.)

Now, there's a lot about God in Her portrayal in Christianity that's strange and skewed when you talk about a father, that becomes simpler when you talk about a mother. God gives us life--well that's precisely the thing that a father doesn't do in the world, but that a mother does, for example. And all that unconditional love , as well as the whole bosom thing.

What if the thing the God does for pain is the Mother's gift?

And if the Mother's gift is death?

Suddenly that strange and unpalatable sliding scale shows up in a new light: While there's pain we want gone--desperately--there's pain we want to keep. Because that pain is the world we don't want to give up. And for some of us, in some situations, we take that pain to our breast, and work through it, and make ourselves stronger and maybe even wiser. God's gift? Her Mercy? No thank you.

For the little girl with the white phosphorous grenade, though, the arms enfold her.

4. I sent you

None of this explains why there is evil in the world in the first place. But, once again, there's that Daddy-mommy thing. Talking about a father-creator it's easy to talk about an architect, a watchmaker, an engineer, a software developer (saints preserve us.) Talking about a mother-creator, one tends to talk about--well, a mother.

It in turn gives rise to the impossibly heretical idea that there is not an idea behind the Universe, no plan: there is just God being Herself.

One can go a vast number of different directions from there. Some give a dark and dangerous view of the nature of thingst as bad as the Calvinist God whom we've let down horribly and so entirely deserve all that molten lead and burning pitch. Some just throw of enigmas like sparks.

I'm saying this because this is not a dazzling chain of inference: Indeed (as a good Socratic) I don't even know whether there is a God, or whether She cares at all about us partially organized bags of adulterated water. However, having thought about a world without a plan but with a solution, this further occurred to me.

Maybe, just maybe, we should stick close to the problem. Maybe there are wars , violence and cruelty because people feel fine about treating other people like shit. Maybe the only entities we should blame are those people.
And maybe there are earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes because the world is a turbulent place; and maybe there are terrible diseases because the biosphere is also a turbulent place. And it's possible that the proper response to these things is to learn who protect ourselves and our fellow children from them.

This goes entirely against vast swathes of the Bible portraying God as the dispenser of good harvests, fertile ova and victory in battle , as well as piles of gold and flocks of sheep; it also sucks for all those peoples who have gone to religion to affect Fortune. (Which is most everybody.)

But it fits in with one of my favorite quotes (got from The Sun , a really remarkable magazine)

A man stands before God and says "What a terrible place the world is! War, drought, plague, cruelty!"
God says, "I know. horrible."
And the man says, "Well, shouldn't you do something about it?"
"I did."
"What did you do?"
"I sent you."

Posted: Friday - September 15, 2006 at 12:59 PM        

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