God & Freedom

God and Freedom

Understanding God as He is and letting go of God as I want him to be.

God meant nothing to me as a young boy. He was without meaning because He was incomprehensible, an abstract absolute. I acknowledged Him as a concept, a great given, something philosophical, larger than myth but not quite authentic, like The Force in Star Wars.

I considered Him the Great Cause and everything else in the universe the necessary effect, but I wondered whether His power was purposeful, or simply an over-the-top exhibition of exhaustless strength. I imagined Him as horrifically huge, a spiritual monstrosity spanning infinite space and time with little to do but wait for the death of billions of people so He could end the world and start over.

At noon on Sunday God seemed slightly more real. We bowed our heads and asked His blessing on our food. We actually talked to Him, and I suspected He had the courtesy to listen. In less than ten seconds the food was ready to eat, somehow perfected by this rare ritual.

At church we prayed for world peace, the end to all suffering, children everywhere, forgiveness and mercy, and strength for tomorrow. I wasn’t certain about God's attentiveness to these prayers because nothing in the world ever seemed to change for the better. If anything, the world seemed to get worse.

In the small Iowa town where I grew up, spiritual fervor was like overly strong coffee that is delicately sampled and politely ignored. Whatever fervor I had led me to wonder about God’s eternity and infinity, His ability to comprehend the future in every detail, and His personal thoughts about me.

I struggled to understand why things in the world were the way they were, and why He had allowed them. After all, God knew everything from eternity past to never-ending future. He saw the whole length of human history before any of it began, which meant He had already seen every evil act, human tragedy, and ounce of suffering. With all that agony, pain, and death, He had already heard every single cry for help that was ever screamed toward heaven.

Why hadn’t God prevented the creation of a world gone so wrong? Why hadn’t the cries of millions given Him reason enough to intervene? If He couldn’t interfere in this world because He lacked power, then He wasn’t really great. If He wouldn’t get involved because He lacked concern, then He wasn’t very good.

Even as a boy I could see that human misery came in many forms. Some suffering was inexplicably horrific, like the Holocaust in Germany, the purges in Russia, and the genocides in Kampuchea, Croatia, and Rwanda. Those who died were not casualties of some freak accident of nature, of impersonal, uncontrollable physical forces. They were victims of the unrestrained malevolence in the human heart, against which there appeared to be no defense, either human or divine.

Less conspicuous but just as heart-wrenching was the solitary suffering that took place in my own neighborhood as parents grieved the untimely death of their son. Clearly, the world didn’t care if a young man were impaled by a car and lay in a coma for days, hanging on to life by one shallow breath after another. Yet that was precisely why his parents beseeched the God of boundless power and love to take notice of his suffering and respond personally, like any father or mother would, and bring miraculous vitality back into his body.

In the end, as we all expected, the boy’s life faded away and the parents’ anguish lingered forever. They would have to live the rest of their days with the numbing reminder that desperate prayers to God went unanswered. Aggravating their very lonely misery, long after the world forgot the boy had even existed, was the painful belief that God was neither as great nor as good as they had imagined or hoped Him to be. For all their spiritual fervor during the most anxious hours of their lives, God was silent and still.

I supposed that these very parents, along with millions upon millions of people of all faiths wondered, too, about God as they witnessed the terrorist attacks in America on 9/11 that killed thousands and collapsed two of the world’s tallest buildings. Was God powerless to stop these terrorists?

And what about the space shuttle disasters? The families of the crews sent them off with supplications to God for divine protection only to watch on television as their loved ones were incinerated. Why had these prayers made no difference in how events played out across the sky that morning?

And what about the strange story of a tree toppling onto a car on a freeway, killing the father and mother in the front seat, but leaving unharmed the six-month old baby in the back seat? If only the car had slowed down or sped up at precisely the right moment, or if only the wind could have pushed the tree inches one way or another, or if only the driver could have had some kind of warning, a premonition, then all this suffering and death could have been avoided.

If only God had done something – even something minuscule on the grand scale to which He’s accustomed – then the world would have been better for a man and a woman and their baby. But God did not intrude, and this small child will grow up in a world without a dad or a mom, and with a loss and a loneliness that will last his lifetime.

It is upon this stage that God asked me to walk, to understand His voice above the deafening irrationality that blames Him for everything wrong in the world. This kind of senselessness includes what one anonymous American recently wrote. “Accidents and terrorist attacks that result in death are terrible events, but they are all part of God’s mysterious plan for our lives. No person dies unless it is part of His divine plan, as hard as that is for us to understand and accept.”

It is hard to understand and accept the idea that every terrible event is some incomprehensible facet of His love for us. Perhaps this notion is unfathomable because it is untrue. A better explanation is that the world has gone wrong by its own hand, with no help from God, either by design or by desire. The world we live in is the one we’ve freely created.

God used His infinite wisdom to create a perfect world of inconceivable beauty. Yet our original parents chose instead to follow their own selfish interests, and in the process plunged their world and ours into a rebellion of insanity. For what could be more insane than rejecting the wisdom and love of God to live in stupidity and self-centeredness?

Even in our warped and wicked world, God is not absent or silent or still. He is actively engaged in adding momentum to every act of human kindness. He always does everything He can to mitigate the often calamitous effects of human freedom, even though at times, like the 9/11 attacks or the Columbia disaster, it may look like God hasn’t lifted a finger to change the course of history.

In this world of moral self-determination, God cannot violate our sovereignty by making us do one thing or stopping us from doing another. At the same time, He seeks to create the highest possible good to come out of the misery we set in motion. These divine decisions constitute a worldwide spiritual influence that responds continuously to billions of human choices being executed every second of time.

Long before September 11, 2001, God witnessed every hour of contemplation that went into the world’s worst terrorist attack. In the midst of this treachery, God was doing all that could be done to ruin the plan without contravening the freedom of those to blame.

When the natural elements of heat and cold destroyed the space shuttles, had God forgotten about the prayers made only a few days before launch? No, God did not forget, but He also could not answer these pleas without suspending the laws of physics. Human error led to human tragedy.

Then there’s the six-month old baby boy whose parents were killed by a tree falling on their car. We don’t know how human freedom impacted this event. We don’t know what the driver was doing or how other drivers nearby were operating their vehicles. We don’t know how human freedom affected the condition of the tree or the road and whether these played a role. We cannot begin to see how the freedom from so many converged in a single moment in time to create such misfortune.

Every person who has ever lived was created to know God and live in His presence and love forever. Unfortunately, this marvelous destiny can become clouded by the adversities we face. When life is hard we don’t feel much goodness from God, and before long, through disappointment, anger, and bitterness, we accept the lie that He is the source of our unhappiness. At the end of our lives our hearts have become so calcified from accumulated grief that we feel absolutely nothing of God. While still difficult to perceive much of His goodness through the darkness in which I find Him, I see one solitary truth in the midst of this awesome mess I call freedom. Simply this - God is here.