It was another conversation with the brother, so long I can’t follow the strand of conversation now, but somehow he got to telling me about his musician, age 60-something friend. “He had two sons, and one of them committed suicide. Then he comes down with prostate cancer. Then the other one killed himself. After all this he asked me, ‘Why does God hate me?’”
I have been listening to a book on CD, one from Stephen Hunter named G-Man. Hunter has a very successful series centered on Bob Lee Swagger, a super sniper and Viet Vet who tracks all sorts of evil people and often kills them from afar. In this latest, 71-year-old Bob Lee (aka, Robert Lee. I hope we are not forced to burn his books) researches the life of his enigmatic grandfather, WWI vet and Arkansas county sheriff @ 1930. Grandpa, too, was an excellent marksman but turned to drink in his last years for reasons that are not understood. Bob finds that Gramps disappeared from the record in the second half of 1934, then reappeared in December of that year – exactly the time when he turned back to the bottle. With expert investigation, he discovers that Gramps had been a part of the fledgling FBI and was key to getting rid of Pretty Boy Floyd, Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and co.. However, all that was stricken from the official record, and the whole operation seemed to have destroyed Gramps. Why?
We find out towards the end of the book. Talking with his now-pal, Bureau head of the Chicago unit, he admits to “wanting to lay with men.” Pow! This from a guy that until that point was portrayed as the most granite-like character one could imagine. It comes to be that Gramps is so fearless because he believes God hates him for his desires – desires he has never acted upon. Gramps goes to a clinic in Hot Springs towards the end of the year to get rid of his desires, but no luck. He then returns to Blue Eye, Arkansas to die a hopeless drunk, preferring to end his days in dark anonymity that he feels is his just punishment.
It is, for most of us, a culture shock and shows how much we have changed in just a few decades. Gay desires are no longer considered the end of the line, a bridge too far, but rather just another variation of the human condition. Fine. But still, we are often faced with evils, real or imagined, that make us believe that God is out to get us. Since we are told that He is a just god, then the evils, or evil desires, that befall us are the result of either evil within us or evil that we have done. Ever thought it best that Grandma should die soon to end her suffering from a hideous disease, and when she does, it is now your fault? Kid born with autism, or becomes a drug addict or kills himself? Punishments for that 1972 Playboy you lusted over, or that candy bar you stole, or that wish you once had that the world goes up in flames to finally end it all. If we sin, even in thought alone, punishment, we are sure, is sure to follow.
The Playboy and the fantasies wouldn’t faze most of us now, but what about the suicides of my brother’ friend’s sons? Wouldn’t most of us feel that we were being punished? I think I would. Or financial ruin out of the blue, or a bizarre cancer at a young age, or being blinded, or…?
I was again astounded a few days ago at the relevance of St Augustine’s Confessions, where he discusses the problem of the existence of evil from a good god (he became one of the early Christians in the Roman Empire in the 4th century). He goes through all the logical points of the well-educated Roman citizen of his day, to come to this conclusion: that all is explained only in God’s divine light. He tell us, in further explanation, that in the ingestion of the host in Holy Communion, the “food” in this case does not change to become a part of us, as other foods do, but changes US so that we might become more like God. God does not need anything from us to increase Himself, not vengeance or the smoke from charred sacrifices, or anything else. Rather, what He does is to use our lives to bring us closer to Him. It is all for us, not for him, all the movements of life or the sacrifices we make, so that we might change into something more like Him. Not for Him but for ourselves. The logic, if we may call it that, of the divine light, then, is apart from us, so far above us that we continually fail to see the point, both of what we consider to be good and what we consider to be bad. We are only partial. To see, we must be so much more. As Augustine relates through his Greco-Roman logic, when we see in part, we see corruption (evil), but if we were to see in full as God does, we would see prevailing perfection. We need growth in the divine light to understand; otherwise, we cannot understand the source or meaning of evil, not as it shines in the perfection of the light.
Augustine ends his ruminations on evil with this: “And when I asked myself what wickedness was, I saw that it was not a substance but a perversion of the will when it turns aside from you, O God, who are the supreme substance, and veers towards things of the lowest order, being bowelled alive and becoming inflated with desire for things outside itself.” Evil, then, is not from the world as made, but from the free will of that or those who have free will. Certainly this answers the question of the worst agony of the man with the suicidal sons, but it might not answer the question of his cancer. What good is in disease?
It brings me back to my dark essay, “Nightmares,” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars, where I ask: what of the suffering of little children? What of the hell for parents with a child dying of a brain tumor? What of the natural disasters that could not be anticipated, the freak tornado in the city schoolhouse, the Corona virus? Where is the good in that? And if it is ultimately good, what good does it do us now? Why inflict this pain of evil on us if, in the end, there is no genuine evil made by God?
St Augustine’s answer above is more subtle than first meets the eye, at least for me. Evil again is in the will, but it is not enough that we will human good. Rather, we see evil because we cling to that which is human without that which is God’s. Christ did cry for Lazarus to show that he understood the sorrow of Man, but then he raised Lazarus from the dead. He knew all along that he could do this. He knew all along that no one dies in the fullness of God’s truth, and so no one who fully understands should have sorrow. In the end, in the fullness of his mission to be born, Christ was crucified, died, and rose from the dead, to show us both the human side and the God side, the side of sorrow and the side of eternal truth and glory. It is we ‘of little faith’ who know sorrow because we have failed to abandon ourselves to the will of God. It is here where we find what the light knows – that its knowledge is beyond ours. And it is only through full submission to the brilliance of the light, where we can push our own thoughts aside and learn truth. We must consider again the lesson of the Holy Host: that the substance of the host is not turned into our bodies, but rather, the bodies are turned back into spirit, the ‘substance’ of God. The later far overrides the former, subsuming it as an ocean subsumes a raindrop.
We cling to that which is human and that which is not God through will. Augustine saw that. The Buddha saw that in telling us not to cling to anything of this earth, but Jesus lived the lesson through his own agony and resurrection, a truth above truth written in a language we can begin to understand, which can then bring us further and further still.
I would not send this essay to one grieving from the loss of a son. It smacks too much of the abstract. But it is not. Consider, if you are not now beyond such an act in your suffering, the grand passage of time and the infinitude of space and we see the smallness of our sufferings. We have been shown that God understands and cares, but that lingering sorrow is not the final truth. Lazarus was brought back from the dead, just as Christ was risen. We are told to lose our will to God’s will, and are told that all the sufferings we have are to help us to do just that. This is not piety in the sky, but a fact in the highest logic of the light.
As a man who would become a saint, Augustine understood this and lived its truth. We are asked, then prodded, by our lives to leave our own will for God’s will. And Augustine was right: to do so is too difficult a path to follow from our own human perspective. We can do so only through faith, which is the ultimate tool we have to submit to God’s will and find the eternal truth of the light. It is impossible to do so on our own, and nearly impossible to accept that we must lose ourselves – lose everything - to gain everything.
Augustine, a genius scholar of his day, went through all the thought experiments that he could before he accepted that we live by the will of God alone, and can truly see only through His light. It is impossibly difficult to do, but he shows us that it is also easy once we willfully submit to that which brings us everything and takes everything back in one great, endless breath.
It was another conversation with the brother, so long I can’t follow the strand of conversation now, but somehow he got to telling me about his musician, age 60-something friend. “He had two sons, and one of them committed suicide. Then he comes down with prostate cancer. Then the other one killed himself. After all this he asked me, ‘Why does God hate me?’”
I have been listening to a book on CD, one from Stephen Hunter named G-Man. Hunter has a very successful series centered on Bob Lee Swagger, a super sniper and Viet Vet who tracks all sorts of evil people and often kills them from afar. In this latest, 71-year-old Bob Lee (aka, Robert Lee. I hope we are not forced to burn his books) researches the life of his enigmatic grandfather, WWI vet and Arkansas county sheriff @ 1930. Grandpa, too, was an excellent marksman but turned to drink in his last years for reasons that are not understood. Bob finds that Gramps disappeared from the record in the second half of 1934, then reappeared in December of that year – exactly the time when he turned back to the bottle. With expert investigation, he discovers that Gramps had been a part of the fledgling FBI and was key to getting rid of Pretty Boy Floyd, Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and co.. However, all that was stricken from the official record, and the whole operation seemed to have destroyed Gramps. Why?
We find out towards the end of the book. Talking with his now-pal, Bureau head of the Chicago unit, he admits to “wanting to lay with men.” Pow! This from a guy that until that point was portrayed as the most granite-like character one could imagine. It comes to be that Gramps is so fearless because he believes God hates him for his desires – desires he has never acted upon. Gramps goes to a clinic in Hot Springs towards the end of the year to get rid of his desires, but no luck. He then returns to Blue Eye, Arkansas to die a hopeless drunk, preferring to end his days in dark anonymity that he feels is his just punishment.
It is, for most of us, a culture shock and shows how much we have changed in just a few decades. Gay desires are no longer considered the end of the line, a bridge too far, but rather just another variation of the human condition. Fine. But still, we are often faced with evils, real or imagined, that make us believe that God is out to get us. Since we are told that He is a just god, then the evils, or evil desires, that befall us are the result of either evil within us or evil that we have done. Ever thought it best that Grandma should die soon to end her suffering from a hideous disease, and when she does, it is now your fault? Kid born with autism, or becomes a drug addict or kills himself? Punishments for that 1972 Playboy you lusted over, or that candy bar you stole, or that wish you once had that the world goes up in flames to finally end it all. If we sin, even in thought alone, punishment, we are sure, is sure to follow.
The Playboy and the fantasies wouldn’t faze most of us now, but what about the suicides of my brother’ friend’s sons? Wouldn’t most of us feel that we were being punished? I think I would. Or financial ruin out of the blue, or a bizarre cancer at a young age, or being blinded, or…?
I was again astounded a few days ago at the relevance of St Augustine’s Confessions, where he discusses the problem of the existence of evil from a good god (he became one of the early Christians in the Roman Empire in the 4th century). He goes through all the logical points of the well-educated Roman citizen of his day, to come to this conclusion: that all is explained only in God’s divine light. He tell us, in further explanation, that in the ingestion of the host in Holy Communion, the “food” in this case does not change to become a part of us, as other foods do, but changes US so that we might become more like God. God does not need anything from us to increase Himself, not vengeance or the smoke from charred sacrifices, or anything else. Rather, what He does is to use our lives to bring us closer to Him. It is all for us, not for him, all the movements of life or the sacrifices we make, so that we might change into something more like Him. Not for Him but for ourselves. The logic, if we may call it that, of the divine light, then, is apart from us, so far above us that we continually fail to see the point, both of what we consider to be good and what we consider to be bad. We are only partial. To see, we must be so much more. As Augustine relates through his Greco-Roman logic, when we see in part, we see corruption (evil), but if we were to see in full as God does, we would see prevailing perfection. We need growth in the divine light to understand; otherwise, we cannot understand the source or meaning of evil, not as it shines in the perfection of the light.
Augustine ends his ruminations on evil with this: “And when I asked myself what wickedness was, I saw that it was not a substance but a perversion of the will when it turns aside from you, O God, who are the supreme substance, and veers towards things of the lowest order, being bowelled alive and becoming inflated with desire for things outside itself.” Evil, then, is not from the world as made, but from the free will of that or those who have free will. Certainly this answers the question of the worst agony of the man with the suicidal sons, but it might not answer the question of his cancer. What good is in disease?
It brings me back to my dark essay, “Nightmares,” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars, where I ask: what of the suffering of little children? What of the hell for parents with a child dying of a brain tumor? What of the natural disasters that could not be anticipated, the freak tornado in the city schoolhouse, the Corona virus? Where is the good in that? And if it is ultimately good, what good does it do us now? Why inflict this pain of evil on us if, in the end, there is no genuine evil made by God?
St Augustine’s answer above is more subtle than first meets the eye, at least for me. Evil again is in the will, but it is not enough that we will human good. Rather, we see evil because we cling to that which is human without that which is God’s. Christ did cry for Lazarus to show that he understood the sorrow of Man, but then he raised Lazarus from the dead. He knew all along that he could do this. He knew all along that no one dies in the fullness of God’s truth, and so no one who fully understands should have sorrow. In the end, in the fullness of his mission to be born, Christ was crucified, died, and rose from the dead, to show us both the human side and the God side, the side of sorrow and the side of eternal truth and glory. It is we ‘of little faith’ who know sorrow because we have failed to abandon ourselves to the will of God. It is here where we find what the light knows – that its knowledge is beyond ours. And it is only through full submission to the brilliance of the light, where we can push our own thoughts aside and learn truth. We must consider again the lesson of the Holy Host: that the substance of the host is not turned into our bodies, but rather, the bodies are turned back into spirit, the ‘substance’ of God. The later far overrides the former, subsuming it as an ocean subsumes a raindrop.
We cling to that which is human and that which is not God through will. Augustine saw that. The Buddha saw that in telling us not to cling to anything of this earth, but Jesus lived the lesson through his own agony and resurrection, a truth above truth written in a language we can begin to understand, which can then bring us further and further still.
I would not send this essay to one grieving from the loss of a son. It smacks too much of the abstract. But it is not. Consider, if you are not now beyond such an act in your suffering, the grand passage of time and the infinitude of space and we see the smallness of our sufferings. We have been shown that God understands and cares, but that lingering sorrow is not the final truth. Lazarus was brought back from the dead, just as Christ was risen. We are told to lose our will to God’s will, and are told that all the sufferings we have are to help us to do just that. This is not piety in the sky, but a fact in the highest logic of the light.
As a man who would become a saint, Augustine understood this and lived its truth. We are asked, then prodded, by our lives to leave our own will for God’s will. And Augustine was right: to do so is too difficult a path to follow from our own human perspective. We can do so only through faith, which is the ultimate tool we have to submit to God’s will and find the eternal truth of the light. It is impossible to do so on our own, and nearly impossible to accept that we must lose ourselves – lose everything - to gain everything.
Augustine, a genius scholar of his day, went through all the thought experiments that he could before he accepted that we live by the will of God alone, and can truly see only through His light. It is impossibly difficult to do, but he shows us that it is also easy once we willfully submit to that which brings us everything and takes everything back in one great, endless breath.
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