Religious Badthink

When an aged lady takes you by the arm and weeps and stares at you and asks you why her husband suffered so horribly after a lifetime of selfless service, and why her godly sister — her only companion in her recent widowhood — was killed by an illegal alien drunk driver, what do you do?

Do you tell her that you’ll pray for her? Give her a soft platitude about all things working together for good? Remind her that her loved ones are in a better place?

Like so many other things about my beliefs, the commonly accepted teaching on the Bible’s view of suffering is much on my mind these days, and such teaching seems wrongheaded and even bizarre. In the book of Job, we’re informed that a very righteous man was visited with a series of tragedies that few people could withstand. After a long period of such physical and emotional torture, exacerbated by smug “friends,” Job finally throws his hands up and cries, “Why?”

And what is God’s response? God, who allowed these things to happen to Job in the first place, barks back at him in a series of rhetorical beat-down questions, “Who do you think you are? Are you Me? Can you do what I do? You have no right to ask me such questions. Shut your presumptuous mouth.”

When a sincere man observes, “That doesn’t make any sense,” he is told to do the same thing Job was told. Shut up. Don’t ask questions. Trust and obey. Who do you think you are?

In the writings of the New Covenant, Paul piles on in a similar vein. He tells his followers that they are lumps of clay and that they have no business asking the Potter why He made them into certain types of vessels. “That’s God’s business, not yours. You have to right to ask such a thing.”

When a grieving widow cried and asked the hard questions, I refused to give her the officially-approved response. I told her that I didn’t know why such things happened to her, and that I didn’t really understand any of it. After our conversation, she thanked me for letting her vent her anguish, and she left in better spirits. And I didn’t have the old familiar guilty film over me, a film caused by the dishonesty of regurgitating words for the sake of being a Good Follower.

I know that tragedy will come to me; it has before and it will again. When it does, if I turn to another person for comfort, I hope that the listener will let me talk and will be honest with me. Anything else is false comfort, and false comfort is a bleak and bad thing.

~ S.K. Orr