Silence

I finished rereading Shusaku Endo's Silence last night (the first time I read it was in 2005). This strikes me as a very important novel--which probably doesn't mean anything more than, "I really like it."

Probably most of us have thought about what we would go through for our faith. Would we be able to die for what we believe? Would we go through torture and be martyred? As we see in Silence, those are the easy questions...

At the next level, would we allow others to be tortured because of our own faith? And, what does it mean to apostatize? Is there a difference between some external action that has always been associated with relinquishing one's faith and the internal commitment? How do we respond to God's seeming silence and indifference?

And perhaps most profoundly, what is the cultural garb of our faith?

I know that a few of you out there have read and appreciated Silence. I'd be interested to hear your takes on it.

A Related Poem

My wife and I lived in Africa for a year just after I graduated. That was the first time I started reading classic fiction, and that is what turned me toward philosophy. One of those books I read was The Brothers Karamazov, which I alluded to in a previous post. This was simultaneously the most challenging and most affirming to my faith of anything that I'd read or experienced up to that time.

Our year in Africa was also a creative time for me in that I wrote a lot of songs and poems and things. The poem below was written during this time, and subsequently was accepted into a poetry anthology (at about the same level of prestige as getting into Who's Who). I don't know if it is much more than doggerel, and feel at my most vulnerable when I put a poem like this out for all to see (or at least both of you!!). But, here it is.

The Trade Off

Since just after the beginning there have been countless years
Imbued with injustice and suffering and tears.
Time doesn't know the hurt and the pain;
It rolls on and on and on unscathed.
But we in our finiteness feel. Pain is real.
It respects not and its wounds do not heal.

Years and years you've let it go on.
Masses have perished without the Son.
Are you really watching? You don't seem to care!
Why is so much evil allowed to be here?
Can the few who have found your eternal light
Be worth more than the loss of those left in the night?

Where is the balance? Where are the scales?
I try to reason but my reason fails.
Where? Oh where is the the most blessed end?
The Omega is solely the one who can mend.
But not just mend--restore and rebirth.
But will even these atone for the evil on earth?

I believe, I do, in you and your plan;
But what can be done in this curséd land
To thwart the darkness in spite of the night
And reclaim the wrong and transform it to right?

More God and Safety

A similar discussion is raging on the Bethel Facebook network in the Bethel Philosophy Group. And here someone wonders whether all tragic situations can be redeemed.

This is tough stuff, because we have such a different emotional reaction to evil than we do a logical one. Logically, I think it's pretty easy to solve the problem of evil... but we're not Vulcans.

Can all evil be redeemed? I guess we Christians believe that in the end, yes, all will be redeemed. Evil's reign is only temporary. All will be made right. But here is where Ivan Karamazov objects: he doesn't want the lion to lie down with the lamb; he doesn't want the afflicted to embrace their afflictors. Forgiveness doesn't take away the fact that someone has been severely wronged.

This is the natural emotional response. Evil ought to evoke anger in us. In the wake of the VTech situation, I was angry that my kids have to grow up in a world where stuff like that happens.

But then unforgiveness doesn't take away the evil that has happened either. And here, then, is an opportunity for us to be chiseled and shaped into people who more fully reflect the image of Christ.

This is still so abstract and impersonal. It used to be much easier for me to reflect on what it meant to love my enemies, because I didn't really have any enemies in the normal sense of the word. Then in the past few months a situation occurred in which I had a very identifiable enemy in a fairly significant and potentially dangerous way. How could I love that person? The situation prevented any personal contact at all, so taking her cookies was out of the question.

To love (in one aspect of the word) is to genuinely will what is best for another person. Could I genuinely pray for God's best to come to her (and not just the heaping of coals variety of best)? I'm pretty sure that one who can do that, conforms more closely to the character of Christ. And in the economy of the Kingdom, there is some redemption that happens.

God and Safety

I was browsing through the Chronicle of Higher Ed today, which included a big section on the Virginia Tech tragedy. Two weeks after the event, it seems that most things have returned to normal outside of the campus itself (and the families themselves who were afflicted). The week after the shooting, I was pretty upset. Most of the media coverage focused on safety--how can we keep our campuses (and our businesses and towns and homes...) safe?

It is interesting that safety doesn't seem to be God's chief concern. Most of us Christians probably have some stories where God did intervene and protect miraculously, but for the most part tragedy doesn't seem to be a respecter of creed or sincerity of belief. Christians die from cancer and are victims of drunk drivers and all the rest. It is not a safe world. This fact causes some theological conundrums.

Jesus taught us to pray, "Deliver us from evil." And he himself prayed--unsuccessfully on most interpretations--that the cup of suffering would pass from him. Granting that God does do this sometimes, still leaves us with the other times. Why doesn't he deliver us from what are obvious evils like psychologically disturbed gunmen?

One response is typically called the free will defense to evil. God places such a high value on the free will of these creatures of his that he's not going to step in and stop the consequences from such actions even when they result in evil. But the problem with this solution is that it is too strong of a response. On this principle, it seems that he never should step in if he values free will so much. This seems to rule out the possibility of any miraculous protection against the evils perpetrated by free agents--a possibility we'd like to leave open. We're still left with the question, "Why does God intervene sometimes and not others?"

While I will uphold free will till I'm blue in the face, it doesn't seem to me that this can be the whole story. And I don't pretend that this settles the problem once and for all, but it seems to me that the answer must lie in the direction of the following: God desires above all our holiness, not our safety or even our happiness. Holiness is an attribute that transcends our existence in this unsafe place, in this kingdom of the world. It is very difficult for us to take the perspective of eternity for ourselves and for those we love, but from God's perspective and from within his kingdom, events like the tragic death of loved ones must look a little different. I don't mean to suggest that they are not difficult or even still tragic. But they must be something else in addition to this. They must be opportunities God has decided to allow because they have some redeeming value for shaping us into the kind of people he wants us to be.

I don't mean to suggest that God is to blame for somehow causing tragedies to happen. Rather, I believe and trust (what else can we do?) that God can use tragic situations for something else, that he can work all things together for good. This is little consolation if our perspective on life is for this world only--quantity and quality of embodied life is all there is. But what if there is more?