Background information: The following was written as response to a question posed in The Good and Beautiful God by James Bryan Smith. On the recommendation of a good friend, I am reading through it and reflecting on some of the questions posed within. The answers given to the questions should be not be assumed to be direct responses to the content of the book. I have enjoyed reading the text even if my answers may at times suggest otherwise.
When confronted with someone's suffering, have you ever wondered, What did they do to deserve that?
The obvious answer is yes. Yes, of course I have wondered why is someone suffering. As a social worker, I am smacked in the face with suffering every single day. On its face, it strikes me as an absurd question. What did anyone do to deserve suffering? Nothing. Why is there suffering in the first place? Who knows but I'll give it a shot in a moment. I believe the question of suffering to be a fundamental question of human existence, only a few degrees away from that most fundamental of questions; why are we here?
The root of the above question of suffering is twofold. One, what did someone do to earn their suffering. and two, how can a good God allow suffering if said God has the ability to prevent or end suffering. I find the first root boring and full of trite justifications to oppress others so I am going to respond the second root. The second part mostly answers the first part anyway.
What does it say about a God who can end suffering but does not? Or so went the thinking of my younger days, days that were filled with much anger, some justified and some not. Anger that was directed out into the world through my work and anger that was directed inward into a torture chamber of self-flagellation.
As I have grown older and found peace with anger that I had and still have, the question of why does anyone suffer has shifted. I no longer spend much time wondering why anyone suffers. The answer is obvious to me. Sure it may be easy to blame a faceless, distant deity but remove God from the equation and everyone still suffers. My experiences with agnosticism and atheism did not end my own experience of suffering nor did they give me any more comforting answers.
Why does anyone suffer? We suffer because we are neither fully good or fully bad. Instead, the uncomfortable truth is that we all carry within us the capacity to be good or bad and those polar extremes are at a constant conflict with each other due to a variety of factors that are mostly outside our control. We all like to imagine that in times of great evil that we would be the ones to respond with courage and stand our ground. (And to be clear, great evil is not being asked to wear a mask.) But, in reality, most of us are going to join the crowd and pick up a machete. To pretend otherwise is both disingenuous and dangerous.
Lately, the question that refuses to leave my mind is not why is there suffering, but rather, why does good happen? We are so quick to justify good that happens as earned or a 'blessing' from God. But, is it? All that I have can be traced back to some evil that was perpetuated against someone at some point in history, whether that history is my own or it is the history of those who came before me. What is good but not evil in disguise and what is evil but not some future good?
Perhaps, the simplest answers are the best ones to the questions of why do some suffer, why does good happen, why is there evil. That is, because they do, it does, and there is. Life just is.
Religion may be the way in which we make meaning out of the seemingly arbitrary cruelty of the universe but that meaning rarely takes away any of that cruelty. In many cases, meaning actually adds to the cruelty. It allows us to derive justification for the suffering of others from which we can then fully insert our heads into the sand while assuring everyone else that it really is possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Questions of why are perhaps the wrong questions. Or, at best, they lead to the same dead end of the same rabbit hole. The existence of God and his hoped for goodness does not little to change the answer of why is there suffering and evil. Whether God is good or not, we still commit genocide against our brothers. Whether God is good or not, we still commit rape against our sisters. Whether God is good or not, we still allow evil to persist. Perhaps, we should focus less on whether or not God is good and more on what are we doing about the evil that runs amok in all of us. And by evil, I do not mean the sin of self that the pastors from the pulpit would tell us can be so easily 'cured' with a bit of kneeling, a bit of singing and a little bit more tithing.
By evil, I mean the byproduct of brokenness that builds generation after generation until the entire system is so fucked that to fix it requires such a high level of intentional resistance and reform that bloody conflict often becomes the only means in which anyone feels change can be brought.
Evil is my fault. Evil is your fault. Suffering is my fault, suffering is your fault. Good is random chance. Evil is random chance. What does it matter why when all why does is distract us from the work of what. What?
What will we do to create healing in our world right now? Putting the onus on a magical being in the sky of our self-justifying minds will not do it, nor does punting under the wholly insipid belief that 'heaven' will be better.
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