Rage, Despair, and a Crisis of Faith

 

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.