Archive for year 2012
“Why Doesn’t God Prevent Genuine Evil In The World?”
The more I read Tom Oord’s work, the more I appreciate his perspective, specifically as it relates to his understanding of God, love and evil.
Death and evil are siblings who share more than the same heritage. Often, we cannot talk about the one without considering the other; we can’t be touched by one without also being touched by the other. Even if evil spares us of physical death, it takes of our life, lessening life’s quality. Death, somehow or another, is evil’s product; and, yet, seems to be able to reproduce it’s progenitor, begging the question, “What comes first … evil or death?”
When you bring God into the conversation of evil and death, the whole thing get’s even more messy.
Here’s a small clip by Oord called, “Why Doesn’t God Prevent Genuine Evil in the World?”.
(from The Work Of The People)
Aside from Tom wearing some of the coolest nuclear holocaust proof glasses I’ve ever seen, he also drops some powerful thoughts.
For instance, he says,
I think it’s time for Christians to take seriously the idea that God’s love makes it the case that God can’t do some things.
And …
… we need to think more seriously about what kind of power God has.
Finally, what do you think about Oord’s conclusion that because of our freedom God can’t prevent evil?
*****
A House Keeping Note: About two months ago I promised a six part series on the problem of evil that only had enough gas to make it to part five (1. “Discarding God”; 2. “My Problem with ‘God'”; 3. “Is It All God’s Will?”; 4.“Open Theism and the Problem of Evil” and 5. “So You Think You Have Free Will?”.
I have the gas for part six. Look for it on Monday.
Unempty Moments
Aly, her mother and grandmother
I can’t remember anything but her underwear.
I can’t remember the day or even which convalescent facility we were in. I can’t remember what my mom was telling me or what I was wearing.
What I can remember is her underwear. They were big, literally granny panties. Soft cotton. Conservative white and new baby pink. No lace or ruffles.
I can remember how they folded softly in my mom’s hands. She caressed them absentmindedly as she spoke.
We were moving my grandmother into a new facility.
We were in the repeat-the-same-question-every-five-minutes stage of her dementia, not yet to the frantic wheelchair racing or the evergreen season of suspicion. She hadn’t yet looked desperately into my eyes and asked if I could find her mother.
Aly and her mother
But still, we were scared, my mom and I. Missing the mother and grandmother we once knew. The woman who remembered her legendary spaghetti and meatballs recipe and walked loops around her apartment complex with friends bearing names like Petey or Marge.
The fear hung silent between us as we unpacked her clothes, a few books, some pictures of toothy grandchildren for her bedside table.
Henri Nouwen talks about patience as one of the cornerstones of the compassionate life; impatience the deterrent that keeps us tapping our feet, checking our watches, and missing the glory of God.
By this point in the story, (like you I venture to presume) I should have been tapping my feet, checking my watch and writing off another summer afternoon as “empty, useless, meaningless.”
But I didn’t.
Aly with her grandmother
The counterpoint to impatience, Nouwen describes another rendering of time when we experience the moment as “full, rich, and pregnant.” When “somehow we know that in this moment everything is contained: the beginning, the middle, and the end; the past, the present and the future; the sorrow and the joy; the expectation and the realization; the searching and the finding.”
This was one of these moments. Watching my mom delicately fold my grandmother’s underwear. In this moment I was gripped by the thought that love need be nothing more than this simple, intimate act.
It became an unempty moment.* A moment I didn’t want to get away from. A moment filled with the glory of God.
To this day, this afternoon represents a rupture for me. A rupture that signaled not a fracture, but a deepening. A deepening love for my grandmother. A deepening respect for my mom. And a deepening gratitude for every humdrum moment-turned-miracle I had left with both of them, together in one room, folding underwear, in an unempty moment.
****
*Precious moments was already trademarked.
****
Aly Lewis is a twentysomething writer from San Diego, Ca. When she’s not writing ridiculously witty and yet still thoughtful and inspiring copy for the international non profit Plant With Purpose, you can find her roller blading, showing off her dope hip hop moves, or overanalyzing her quarter life crisis. She has a passion for social and ecological justice, anyone who speaks Spanish, and experiencing the God of the unexpected. You can check out her mismatched musings on life here: http://memoirsofalgeisha.blogspot.com/.
And make sure you are one of the first followers of Aly’s newly hatched Twitter account!
On Not Knowing Where Your Dad is Buried
Today’s guest post is from Lisa Colón DeLay, who describers herself as “CREATIVE, NINJITSU INTERVIEW PRACTITIONER, IMPROMPTU HUMORIST, DISPENSER OF FREE SAVVY, SPIRITUAL FORMATION PROVOCATEUR.” You can stalk her on Facebook, follower her on Twitter and visit her blog. But, be forewarned, if you attempt any form of stalkery, her Ninja skills will find you out.
****
The long and drawn out precursor to my father’s death is something out of a bad made for TV movie. It has all the twists, turns, and unbelievability that would make a most incredulous 90 minutes on the small screen. After all, how many people do you know incur a brain stem infarction (kind of like a stroke, but much creepier and not nearly as well-known) only to live through it, become permanently brain injured, and profoundly disabled (think: Terri Schivo). Then comes the 11 year grieving process as he physically wastes away in a nursing home, battling countless infections. At the onset, I was 20 and my father was 44. You can’t make stuff like this up. And I didn’t even mention the lawsuits.
Death and its many friends wreak havoc on an already shattered family. The details are scandalous, but not as important or profound as a memorial service with no body with whom to part. The trouble isn’t so much the service or the memorializing, it’s not being told where they laid him. It’s not just me–it bothered Mary Magdalene quite a bit too. My step mother still sends Christmas and Easter cards, but she’s never told me where my father’s ashes are buried. He could be on her mantle, for all I know, or interred at a secret place as a result of paranoia. A bit of spite can go a very long way.
And so what resurrects is not a hope in seeing my dad’s resting place, but rather in understanding that many, if not most things in life remain outside of my control. Even things one would consider simple and common.
I’ve thought about what I’d do if I knew where my father was buried. In the movies it’s always raining when they bury someone. Later when people visit the grave, it’s usually breezy. It’s warmer out too, which is nice. I would pick a mild day. 72º and mostly sunny. I’ve pictured myself putting notes, or flowers, or photos near the headstone. Praying as a sit in the grass near the site, or singing. A grave doesn’t help the one who died, I’ve realized. It helps the one who’s left behind.
Transforming from the bruised hopes of a missed connection with a departed loved one, I think more about the living now, not the dead. And about my own living. Some of that I can and should control. Photos and memories take the place of a gravestone, and I try to do right by how my dad would want me to think about the situation.
He’d want me to be gracious. He’d want me to remember not where he was buried, but how he loved me, and the better parts of how he lived. And that is actually the same thing I want for my own children. The bigger lesson is in the living memory, not the ground marker. (I say this to myself when I’m feeling particularly strong.)
Maybe the marked spot would trap me somehow the way an unknown spot never can. Maybe it’s not so savage after all. Maybe I can find a gift in the pile of manure. With a Living God this is possible.
I wish for everyone to get whatever they need in the process of grief. I understand what mementos mean. They are precious things because they signify something that mattered. They honor what was lost. But for those who have nothing to call a burial place for someone they love, I wish for freedom from that sort of extra hurt. I wish for something bigger and life-giving to grow out of that tender spot.
Turtles, Trees, and the Spiral of Time
Today’s guest post is from bereaved parent Joy Bennett.
*****
Joy Bennett
I’ve always pictured time as a line, with me an unchanging dot moving from moment to moment from birth on one end to death at the other. I have an almost visceral reaction to thinking of time, and myself within it, like this. In this model, I am static. The dot that is me remains unchanged as it moves through each moment. And at points of loss, the vision of me moving relentlessly farther and farther away from the person lost aches to my core.
I read something recently that describes time as a spiral. The spiral illustrates how then is very much a part of now and it all influences what’s next. It describes how dynamic and alive we are as we move through life.
I think time-as-spiral is a better model. It recognizes that we are more than a static pile of cells. We are constantly being shaped by the interaction of our individual characteristics and choices, our past (the full spectrum of joys and pains we’ve experienced), and our future (our goals and plans and dreams).
I am the person I am today because of my past experiences, my joys and pains, and the quirks that make me me. You are the person you are today because of what makes you you, what you’ve experienced already, and what you hope to do in the future.
I am fascinated by the ways each person’s experiences shapes them, and how much they control that shaping. A lack of depth of experience renders a person less developed but less scarred. A wide and deep range of emotional experience can ripen a person into a rooted maturity, or it can singe them into a scarred, cynical shell.
My own life experience was relatively unremarkable before the birth of our first child. I overcame a handful of hurdles growing up: a few small heart-breaks, the deaths of two grandfathers, a cross-country move, the crucible of working as a resident assistant in a conservative Baptist college’s dormitory. (Two words: not fun.) Engagement, wedding planning, and the first year of marriage were mostly euphoric, with a few requisite lows, some tears, and a lot of talking things out. I remember sensing that life had been too calm and that something big was coming.
Then Elli arrived. We were catapulted into what seemed like an alternate universe. Hearing words like, “I wish I could say, ‘but the good news is ___,’ but I can’t” fires depth charges into your soul.Kissing your infant goodbye before surgery, knowing that the odds are 1 in 5 that she’ll survive for you to kiss her again, is one of the darkest paths one can tread. The sleepless nights caring for a child too sick to catch a breath or stop coughing or who just can’t sleep confronts you with darkness that you never dreamed lurked inside yourself.
That alternate universe wasn’t all dark desperation, though. We uncovered the pure delight of watching a child learn how to laugh, discovering how to make her smile, and celebrating each hard-won milestone. She redefined what was important and what was worth our energy.
Elli carved the raw material of us and left a distinct contour on everyone who met her. She’s been gone nearly three years, but the mark she made on each of us is permanent. We are now faced with what we do with it — how to move forward. What we choose each day is shaping us.
We all leave marks on the people with whom we interact. Whether those interactions provoke dark valleys or euphoric highs is often out of our control, but we can determine how it shapes us.
But how? How can the things which wound and scar us so deeply become the very things that strengthen us and equip us to help others?
Jesus.
This is one of the many beautiful themes we find the Bible. Terrible things happen. I will not say that God causes tragedy, but I will declare that God is not thwarted by it. God can take natural disasters and the evil schemes of people and make those things produce good, in spite of themselves. This is what happened when Jesus was killed — people murdered God’s Son and yet, that very thing that was meant for evil became the greatest good ever accomplished on earth. In the worst betrayal ever recorded, Jesus defeated death and made peace with God for us. Joseph’s brothers were jealous of him and meant to do him harm when they sold him as a slave. But God used it to save Joseph’s family and preserve the nation of Israel through them. We see it in nature, in the rejuvenation of a forest ravaged by fire. Over and over, we see God redeeming tragedy.
When I remember this, when I trust God to bring something beautiful out of my pain (even if takes years), I grow stronger. When I forget it, when I’m overcome by the circumstances and see only myself and what was lost or damaged, the pain burns and scars and my heart withdraws into a cynical bitter shell. (And as one who has hidden in my turtle shell and licked my wounds many times, hope is never lost. God can redeem even that, and he can transform the most recalcitrant turtle.)
How do you think about time and yourself in it? Who and what has shaped you? How are you responding to it?
*****
Here’s Joy’s bio: “I am a writer, thinker, asker of questions, mother, wife, bereaved parent, walking by faith, still in process. I’ve blogged since 2005, writing on faith and doubt, family life (which is always humorous even with the medical spin), grief, and the depression that I only recognized a year after our oldest died at the age of 8. Views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of me yesterday.”
Send your love and likes her way on Facebook, add yourself to her Twitter tribe and check out Joy’s incredible blog!
The Broken-Open Heart Vs. the Broken Apart Heart
It seems there’s two poles in the livings reaction to death:
the one pole is where people almost think death is unreal … that when we die we simply “go to a better place” where all is not only okay, but it’s better.
And then there’s another pole. It’s the pole of darkness. Where death is
real
and heavy
and monstrous.
The thick cloud of paralyzing despair … the broken apart heart.
When we experience death — especially of the traumatic and tragic kind — we will often go back and forth, from one pole to the next, yet drawn, pulled to the pole of the real where all is dark. And we fight it. Often changing poles day by day … at times, hour by hour. From despair to hope and back again.
What we should seek to find in our grief is what Parker Palmer calls the creative tension between the two poles … the middle ground where our hearts are neither
totally mended
nor
broken apart,
but
broken open.
That last line encapsulates the creative tension I strive for in my life:
“We’re called to live in this world with broken, open hearts. Not denying the suffering and grief, but neither striving for perfection that takes us out of the action and into a fantasy world.”
*****
Special thanks to Monika Allen — manager of all things awesome at YWAM Madison’s blog — who sent me the link to this video.
