Rage, Despair, and a
Crisis of Faith
Today I can feel nothing but rage and despair. These
feelings were provoked yesterday when my wife told me of something she’d seen
on the morning TV news. The report was on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza brought
on by the criminal attack that Israel is conducting on civilians in that
unfortunate enclave. The story showed a little girl standing beside a
stretcher. There was a body on the stretcher completely covered by a sheet. The
little girl was crying, “Mama! Mama!” That image has eaten at me ever since.
How the hell can we do it? Why the hell do we do it? We humans are better at
killing each other than we are at anything else. We spend unconscionable
amounts of money on the tools of death and destruction. We apply our best
technology to the instruments of war. Some of our most capable people devote
their lives to our instruments of death. We are geniuses at coming up with
justification for going out and killing Lord knows how many of our fellow human
beings. How the hell can we do it? Why the hell do we do it?
There is always war going on somewhere. After al-Qaeda
killed three thousand Americans out of nothing but blind, irrational hate, my
country started two wars, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. Afghanis and
Iraqis killed quite a few of our troops, and we killed thousands upon thousands
of Afghanis and Iraqis. Both of those countries are now disaster areas that may
never fully recover. Those wars of ours accomplished absolutely nothing
constructive. War rarely does.
Two wars occupy the headlines today. One is Vladimir Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine. The history of relations between Russians and Ukrainians
is fraught, but the irrational justification for this war comes down to the demented
delusion that Ukrainians are really Russians and that the Russians have not
just a right but a duty to force them back under Russian rule. Ukrainians may
be closely related to Russians linguistically and culturally, but they are not
Russians. Just ask them. They have been striving for recognition of their
separate national identity and freedom from Russian domination for at least a
couple of centuries. Both the old imperial government of Russia and Putin have
claimed that there is no Ukrainian language, that what linguists call the
Ukrainian language is really just a dialect of Russian. It isn’t. I can read a
good deal of Russian. I can read essentially no Ukrainian. Yes, there are
cognates between the two languages. They are, after all, both East Slavic
languages. But the notion that Ukrainian is really a kind of Russian is nothing
but a Russian imperialistic fantasy.
At least since the end of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991,
Ukraine has been a sovereign nation recognized as such by the international
community of nations. Has there been corruption there? Of course there has.
There is corruption in most governments and certainly in most fledgling
democracies. Is the Ukrainian government fascist like Putin claims? Of course
not. The government of President Zelensky was freely and fairly elected by the
Ukrainian people. Are the Ukrainians committing genocide against Russians in
Ukraine? Of course not. There are many Russian speakers in Ukraine, but most of
them consider themselves to be Ukrainian not Russian nationals. Russians and
Ukrainians live together perfectly well in Ukraine. Putin’s claim that they do
not is damned near hallucinatory.
But what if Putin were right about Ukraine? Would that
justify the Russians killing tens of thousands of Ukrainians, destroying
Ukrainian cities, committing war crimes against civilians, and abducting
Ukrainian children into Russia? Hell no it wouldn’t! There is no conceivable
justification for what Russia is doing in Ukraine whatsoever. Russia’s war is
doing in Ukraine what war always does. It brings nothing but death, injury, and
destruction. We should all hope and pray that somehow the Ukrainians succeed in
driving the criminal Russian forces out of their country.
There is another war that hogs the headlines these days even
more than the Russian war on Ukraine. It is the conflict I began this piece
with. On October 7, 2023, terrorists of the Palestinian organization Hamas
attacked Israel. They committed horrific crimes against innocent Israeli
citizens. They committed a crime against humanity. There may be explanations of
the reasons for their attack, but nothing can justify what those Hamas
terrorists did. I want nothing I say here to detract from that horrific truth.
But while there may be explanations of the reasons for
Israeli’s massive military response to the October 7 attack, nothing can
justify what Israel is doing in Gaza. Yes, Hamas controls Gaza. That doesn’t
make everyone in Gaza a terrorist. Most of the people in Gaza by far are
innocent civilians like that little girl and her dead mother covered up on a
stretcher. Israel has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza the likes of which
the world has rarely seen. And “humanitarian crisis” sounds so clinical. It
almost sounds neutral, scholarly, impersonal. But what Israel is doing in Gaza
is anything but impersonal. That little girl whose mother the Israelis killed
is a specific human being, a child of God. So was her mother. The suffering
Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians of Gaza is personal. It kills specific
individual people, people whom others love, people with families and with hopes
for their children’s futures. It takes parents away from children and children
away from parents. What Israel is doing in Gaza is every bit as much a crime
against humanity as was the Hamas attack on Israel. Life in Gaza wasn’t easy
before the Israeli attacks, but Israel has turned it into a living hell, and
there isn’t a shred of justification for it.
As I sit here in my warm, comfortable, safe home, millions
of my fellow human beings are living through a hell inflicted on them by other
human beings, but that’s nothing new. Human beings have inflicted hell on other
human beings for as long as there have been human civilizations. Our modern
technology does that far more effectively and efficiently than the spears and
arrows of the ancient world, which just makes what we do far worse than what
the Roman legions were able to do. And we keep doing it over and over and over
again. As if doing it raised no moral questions at all. As if slaughtering each
other were a perfectly normal, acceptable thing for us to do. I don’t need to go
through an extensive list of our human horrors. We all know about the
Holocaust. Many of us know about Stalin’s gulag and the tens of millions of
people he killed. Many of us know of the Holodomor, when the Soviets but mainly
the Russians starved millions of Ukrainians to death. Many of us have heard of
the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. We all ought to know more than we do about
the millions the Chinese Communists have killed. Yes, we humans are better at
inflicting hell on other humans than we are at much of anything else.
And these days more than ever I cry: Why?! And: How can we
do it? How can we so glibly kill and maim other people who have every bit as
much a right to a decent life as we do? People who are children of God every
bit as much as we are. People with hopes and dreams no different from ours. People
who love and are loved. People who feel the same pain we feel. People who have
the right to die a natural death every bit as much as we do. Why do we do it?
How can we do it?
And there is an even more profound question that I’m asking
today. I ask: God! How can you let it happen? Why don’t you stop us from doing
it? As I drove to church yesterday I said, “God, I can’t stop it, and you don’t
stop it!” I thought, if God is really God, God could stop it. God could keep us
from doing it. But God doesn’t stop it. God doesn’t keep us from doing it. So
today I’m asking in a way I don’t think I ever have before: Is there a God? Is
God a reality, or is God just something we’ve made up? Or maybe there is a God
of sorts, but God actually can’t stop us from doing what we do to each
other. But then I ask: If God can’t stop us from doing it, what the hell kind
of God is that? Why should we worship a God like that? Today I must say, beats
the hell out of me.
And I ask: Is it possible in the face of all of the horror
of human life still to believe in God? To trust God? To worship God? Is it
possible for me to keep on devoting my life to the ministry of Jesus Christ to
which I have been ordained for more than twenty years? Today all I can say is
that I hope that someday, somehow, I will find a way to keep doing it. I’ve
done it for so long. It has meant so much to me. I have so proclaimed faith in
God in preaching, teaching, and writing. But what I’ve said about God for years
sounds hollow today. I’ve said that God is present with humanity generally and
with every one of us individually every minute of our lives whether we know it
or not. I’ve said that God stands in solidarity with us, wanting only good for
us and nudging us in the direction of the realm of God, toward a world of peace
and justice, a world in which everyone has enough because no one has too much.
But today I cry: Presence isn’t enough! Solidarity isn’t
enough! God, we need more. All the words I’ve spoken and written about God’s
presence and solidarity sound not just empty but false. I’ve said God was in
the Nazis’ gas chambers and in the pits into which the bodies fell as the SS
and other Germans murdered millions of innocent Jewish people. Today I say:
What the hell good did that do anyone? I suppose their faith may have given
some of them something to hold onto as they were murdered, but they were still
murdered. Maybe many different kinds of faith have given people something to
hold onto and even something to give them hope as other people subjected them
to a living hell on earth. That may have done those people good in a sense, but
it didn’t stop those other people from subjecting them to a living hell on
earth. Today I say: God, thank you for your presence and solidarity; but God
damn it, it isn’t enough!
Is there any way for me to hold onto my decades old belief
in and commitment to the ministry of God? I can think of only a couple of
things that might do it. One is to remind myself of the times I have felt the
presence of a spiritual power in my life. Of the time God lifted me up as I
sunk in despair over the death of my wife. Of the beatific vision my wife had
as she suffered and neared death that said that both she and I were safe in God’s
hands. Will reminding myself of those things save my faith? Maybe, but only
maybe.
The other thing I can think of is to let my questions of why
and how we can do it remain unanswered and to immerse myself nonetheless in the
practices and rituals of the Christian faith the way countless other Christians
have done over the millennia. I have long said that we can’t know God in God’s
fullness because of our status as creatures not gods. I have insisted that the
ultimate questions about who God is and how God is are not just unanswered but
are unanswerable. Maybe I need to learn to be satisfied with the question of
how God can let all the human horror happen be one of those unanswerable
questions. Perhaps doing that, and immersing myself in the Christian faith, can
do that, but only perhaps.
I sure as hell don’t have an answer to any of this stuff.
Sure. I can talk about God giving us humans free will and not intervening to
control our behavior because doing so would violate our free will. But what the
hell did the Israelis’ free will mean to that little girl as she cried out for
her dead mother? It surely meant not one God-damned thing to her. I can talk,
as I have, about how creaturely life must be imperfect because it is not God’s
life. But what the hell did our being creatures not gods mean to that little
girl as she cried out for her dead mother? It surely meant not one God-damned
thing to her. Sure. God was with her. God was mourning with her. What the hell
good did that do her? Surely it didn’t do a single God-damned thing for her.
So I carry on. I go on living with my rage, despair, and
doubt. I remind myself of those times when God’s presence and solidarity with
me meant a lot to me. I remind myself of the times when I have known that God’s
presence and solidarity with them has meant a lot to other people. I continue
to immerse myself in the practices and rituals of Christianity as much as I
ever have, which isn’t nearly as much as perhaps I should have. I go on living
with my doubt about the reality of God. I’ve often insisted that doubt is part
of the life of faith. Well, I sure am proving the truth of that contention
today. Why, God? Why do we do it? How can we do it? Why don’t you stop us from
doing it? I have no answers. So be it.
