"Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof." ~Kahlil Gibran
A good friend gave me a book to read called, "Disappointment in God," by well known Christian author, Philip Yancey. I found it to be one of the best books on God I have ever read. It spoke right to how I feel, almost as if the author had interviewed me for the book. It addresses three questions that many people like me have in our heart: Is God unfair? Is God silent? Is God hidden? And with those three questions it addresses the ultimate feeling of disappointment in God.
The beginning talks about looking at God as a sort of "parent" and Yancey sums up Gensis as God learning how to be a parent. With the rebellion of Adam and Eve, God responded with punishment and Yancey compares this to what it feels like to be a parent of a two-year old. The beginning of the book twists your perspective around from what it feels like to be you to what God must have felt. In the creation, Yancey writes of God as almost a "close, even hovering parent," not shy to intervene. What did God feel when he was betrayed with the rebellion of Adam and Eve and a generation later when Cain slain his brother? The Bible sums up God's feelings with the powerful sentence, "The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth and his heart was filled with pain." I never before thought to turn the tables and try to see things from God's eyes. That God could feel pain and grief, loss and anger. Toward the end of Genesis, Joseph is introduced and in Joseph's story, God works more behind the scenes as opposed to the beginning parts of Genesis where he stayed close by and often intervened. Once again, Yancey compares God to a parent here again wondering if perhaps God "pulled back" to "allow Joseph's faith to reach a new level of maturity." Could God be doing that with me? Pulling back so that my faith may mature and eventually bloom? Throughout Joseph's story, he learned to trust, even through the hardships. Joseph learned not that God would prevent hardships, but that he would redeem them.
In the start of the book Yancey also talks about limitations. He first compares the limitations of any creator whether it be a child with play-doh or an artist like Michelangelo. Yancey states that every creator "learns that creation involves a kind of self-limiting. You produce something that did not exist before, yes but only by ruling out other options along the way...pick up a pencil and start drawing; now you limit yourself to black and white, not color." With the creation in Genesis, God imposed upon himself his own self-limitations and by giving freedom to man he also created the "moral capacity" for human beings to rebel. One theologian put it this way, "Man is God's risk." In a rendition of creation by William Irwin Thompson, he writes about God's worries in creating a universe that is free, free even of Himself: "What if I veil my Divinity so that the creatures are free to pursue their individual lives without being overwhelmed by My overpowering presence? Will the creatures love me? Can I be loved by creatures whom I have not programmed to adore Me? Can love arise out of freedom?....But if I introduce freedom into this universe, I take the risk of introducing Evil into it as well, for if they are free, then they are free to deviate from My will as well...Ahhh, in a truly free universe, even I do not know how it will turn out. Do I even dare take that risk for love?" I wrote the other day about seeing myself through someone else's eyes. I never imagined trying to see through God's eyes and what He must be feeling about happenings in this world. C.S. Lewis once said, "Perhaps we do not realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite free-wills to co-exist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve at every moment almost a sort of "divine abdication." With the creation of free-will, did God also create His own self-limitation? Did he give up some of his power to give us freedom to live our lives?
The book soon comes around to the subject of Jesus. There is a lot to be said on the subject but one thing has always irked me and evidently it caught Augustine's attention as well: "If Jesus had the power, why didn't he heal everyone?" In regards to this nagging question, Yancey takes the Gospel of John for example. There was a certain pool in the city of Jerusalem that the disabled of all kinds used to flock to. Yancey tells this story: "One day Jesus struck up a conversation with a pathetic man who lay there. He had been crippled for thirty-eight years, he told Jesus, but he had never made it to the pool. Whenever the water stirrs, someone would always push in ahead. Without batting an eye, Jesus ordered the invalid to get and walk. 'At once the man was cured; he picked up his matt and walked.' But the storyteller, John, adds one significant detail: Jesus then slipped away into the crowd." Why then, if Jesus was able to heal the disabled and lame, did he only heal one man? He ignored all the rest of the crowd that day. "Augustine wondered: 'There lay so many, and yet only one was healed, whilst He could by a word have raised them all up.' " I just don't understand if Jesus had the power, why he choseto heal some and not others. I might be able to deal with my accident better if he would just reach down and help me heal better. But instead I feel ignored.
I am not alone in my demand for God to show himself, prove himself, show some kind of sign that he is there. Often times it is in anger. Yet He does not. Yancey talks about this as "divine restraint," writing, "God holds back; he hides himself; he weeps. Why? Because He desires what power can never win." I have often cursed life, screaming up to God demanding an answer back to the age old question, "why is life so unfair?! Why did this happen to me?" Why do bad people often seem to prosper and good people get socked in the stomach with bad things that happen to them. I have also often cursed God asking him why He is so unfair. If he has the power to help me, why doesn't he? But I never thought of this possibility that Yancey proposes: perhaps God also agrees that life is unfair but cannot do anything about it. I have entertained the latter idea, that God cannot do anything, that perhaps he is powerless to intervene but I never thought about God agreeing that life is unfair. Yancey talks about some of the things Rabbi Harold Kushner writes about in his book, "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, " (which I also own) and according to Kushner, "God is as frustrated, even outraged by the unfairness on this planet as anyone else, but he lacks the power to change it." This is an idea I have thought about a lot; that there is a God and he may hear my cries, my pleas and my prayers, but he has no power to do anything about it. And that leads us to the works of Karma. But also to the idea that there is some kind of reason behind suffering that we have to look for in it all. Many people have told me, "God will not make you suffer what you cannot handle, " "Concentrate on the blessings you still enjoy - at least you are alive, " and "Someone is always worse off than you so be thankful despite your circumstances," among other statements. But as the Book of Job demonstrates, as Job's friends each offered some version of the sentences above, such helpful advice still does nothing to answer the questions of my pain - "Why? Why me?"
I think the most profound part of the book for me was when Yancey talks about an interview he had with the person he found was closest to Job in this modern day. He called him Douglas. Douglas got dealt a shitty hand in life to put it bluntly. According to Yancey, years ago, doctors found a lump in his wife's breast and subsequently removed it only for the cancer to spread to her lungs two years later. Then one night, with his wife and twelve-year old daughter in the car, they were hit head on by a drunk driver. The wife was thankfully unhurt, the daughter a broken arm but it was Douglas who suffered the worst with a massive blow to the head. After the accident, Douglas suffered from severe headaches, would sometimes become disoriented and forgetful, and his vision was permanently affected with a wandering eye, inability to focus and double vision. But when Yancey asked him what he has learned that might help someone else going through a difficult time, his answer blew me away and gave me something to think about. It gave me back some faith. Douglas said, "To tell you the truth Philip, I didn't feel any disappointment in God...And the reason is this. I learned, first through my wife's illness and then especially through the accident, not to confuse God with life. I'm no stoic. I am upset about what happened to me as anyone could be. I feel free to curse the unfairness of life and to vent all my grief and anger. But I believe God feels the same way about that accident - grieved and angry. I don't blame Him for what happened. I have learned to see beyond the physical reality of this world to the spiritual reality. We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair.' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life...then I set myself up for a crashing disappointment....If we develop a relationship with God
apart from our life circumstances then we may be able to hang on when the physical reality breaks down. We can learn to trust God despite all the unfairness of life." Wow. That blew me away when I read that. What an absolutely different way to look at life and God. Not to confuse God with life and to develop a relationship with God
apart from our life circumstances. Those two ideas really resonate with me. Makes me want to try a relationship with God again.
Lastly I wanna speak of what Yancey has to say of faith in the end. Yancey writes that we as humans are bound by time and perceiving time in "something like a never-ending present....We do all our thinking in the present." Even if we are thinking about something that happened in the past, we are doing the process of thinking in the present. And if we think about something in the future, that process of thinking is still being done in the present. Yancey writes a very powerful sentence, "Because I only exist in the present, I can only perceive the past and the future from the perspective of the present." He also writes in relation to time, "Can we live now, 'as if' God is loving, gracious, merciful and all-powerful, even while the blinders of time are obscuring our vision?" We are a people bound by the present, despite the old adage that "you're living in the past," or "You're living in a dreamworld." We do everything in the present and thus we must make the most of that present. Yes, life may be damn unfair and we may curse God for being unfair but maybe we shouldn't confuse life with God, like Douglas said. It is simply life itself that is unfair. And maybe God refuses to answer our demands and crying questions because we are unable to comprehend his answers, his light. And when we are grieving and angry, God may be grieving and angry right along with us. To think that God is angry and grieving along with me for what happened to me helps reduce some of that grief and anger actually.
One last word from the book: "Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse."
