Over thanksgiving break I returned to my old stomping grounds of southeastern Connecticut to enjoy some time away. Like most of us who are able to go home for break, I went to the church that I had grown up attending. At my church, we had a pleasant thanksgiving service where we sang a few pleasant songs and listened to some pleasantly touching testimonies of people who had been dealing with pain but since had conquered their weakness in exchange for a period of pleasantly artificial joy.
What is our infatuation with writing off our problems as God’s will?
Let me give you an example. One of the elders of my church interviewed a husband and wife and their severely handicapped daughter. She had been born with a kind of chromosome malfunction that ensured a highly underdeveloped mind and body. The family went on to describe the difficulties that are accompanied by having a child with those handicaps.
However, they assured all of us pleasant people in the audience that their problem was nothing to be concerned about, since they knew it was in God’s will for their daughter to be born that way. One might be tempted to ask how God could will that sort of misfortune on that family, or more importantly on the girl herself. They assured us that God was teaching them a great many things through their difficulty; that someday their problem would be solved and someday their troubles would make sense when God showed them the big picture in heaven. The family finished their interview to many murmurs of assent and mms of approval. The elder went on to pray, thanking God for his sovereignty over situations similar to this family’s.
I guess for me, it just doesn’t add up.
In my mind there is this ideal reality for which both God and creation are yearning. The Jews called it Shalom. I think Christians call it heaven, though for many of us our conception of this reality is a little off base at best. In any case, there is harmony, or ultimate peace between heaven and earth. We as humans live fruitfully, engaging in meaningful labor under the righteous rule of God while our full spiritual significance is constantly being realized. All of creation is bursting with potential, growing and changing and living.
What we see here on earth is almost always the opposite of this. We see the corruption of our potential as human beings as we are always forgetting that potential. We do this when we fail to realize the imago dei in every individual. When we compromise someone’s humanity simply because of the way they dress, or the things they think, or the breadth of their intellect, we reduce the significance God has placed on them. I can hardly go ten seconds without doing this. We see whole species going extinct, their purposes and beauty gone forever. It’s very obvious that this is not the reality that God intended, nor willed.
So why then is my church so ready to attribute the misrepresentation of this family’s daughter as God’s will? More importantly, why is my church so ready to celebrate the compartmentalization of their difficulty and pain? They admire this family’s ability to shrug off their problem in order to reaffirm their concept of Jesus as the instant cure-all to life’s difficulties, or at least the paradigm by which to understand pain.
So then how do we fit something like the malfunction of a human being’s chromosomes into our Christ-centered view of the world? While I can’t answer that question, I can tell you what I think about the manifestation of God’s will in human beings. It certainly isn’t manifested in the corruption of human beings. I believe that it is manifested in the goodness that can yet still flow from human beings. I would argue that the realization of God’s will on earth in bringing Shalom is fundamentally tied to our actions as his creation. Another way of saying this is that we are the medium by which God desires to bring peace and justice and reconciliation to this world, and Jesus’ act of redemption allows us to do that.
So let’s stop pretending that it is God’s will for us to experience pain.
I envision a church where a family can share their difficulty in an honest way without having to adhere to a religious philosophy for pain. At this church the congregation can mourn with them, and even weep with them over the degeneration of creation, and the sub-nature of our human existence. At this church the objective would be to motivate people to realize the potential for every human being to be a positive influence in the world and encourage them to pursue that, rather then give them the misconception that someday everything will be alright and we don’t need to worry about it. Thanksgiving would be a time where this church could celebrate the good things its people had done in their community and the ways Jesus was empowering them to change the world, rather than invent reasons to feel a false joy. At this church, suffering would be engaged and not compartmentalized.
And at this church, honesty would be more valuable than easy answers.
