Boston

People can have a low opinion of God.

Night is about Elie Wiesel's experiences as a Jewish child in a German death camp. There is a moment in Night when Elie Wiesel rejects God. But when I read this memoir many years ago, I wasn’t clear about the nature of his rejection. I couldn’t tell if he stopped believing in God, or if he decided that God was such a – excuse me – shitty god that he wasn’t worth regarding.

I think of Elie Wiesel when I think of the terrible events at the Boston Marathon – a bombing that killed three people, including an eight-year-old child. The bombs wounded over one-hundred by-standers. People were mangled. People lost legs.

How many of the wounded survivors, how many of their loved ones, now think of God as a shitty god?

1. I can’t judge.

If they do, I can’t judge them. I can’t judge Elie Wiesel. I have not suffered in a death camp. I have not lost a limb. I myself have been on the edge of annihilation, but I never went over the edge.

2. The nature of God: perplexity.

I rarely wonder if God exists. I sometimes wonder about his nature.

The nature of the world invites wonder about the nature of God. No-one can be completely ignorant of evil. Holocausts. Cancer. Children who die. People who starve. Mental illness. Murder. Injustice. Slander. Selfish people who prosper. Kind people who lose their jobs, their homes, their dignity.

3. My hard times.

I have, like I said, never suffered like Elie Wiesel, or like many of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. I’ve never had a child ripped away by death.

But I have had my share of anguish. As a young man, I was career-proud. I was hopeful of doing great things in the law; I hoped one day to become a judge, maybe even a judge of a high court. I intended to leave a big footprint on life.

I worked hard. I was so confident in my work-ethic and in my smarts that I shunned the games I saw among many of my colleagues – the backbiting, the sabotaging.

I thrived for a time. But a supervisor was put over me who thwarted me. She made my work a misery. In a year’s time under her authority, I lost my dynamism and became a listless worker. Unbearably fatigued, I resigned and limped to another job. It took a long time to recover.

I went mad many years ago; before I regained sanity, I found myself in panicked flight from a vast Satanic conspiracy that seemed so widespread that I could not eat. I could not eat because everywhere I went, these demonically-clever conspirators seemed somehow to poison my food and control my mind.

I have represented clients who deserved to win their cases because they were innocent or in the right. But they have had victory plucked away from them by a partisan judge or by a jury that was proud to afflict a victim of police violence and prosecutorial overreach, or who rejected mountains of proof that my clients were in the right. Please trust me: if you care for your clients, and I usually do, this bleeds your spirit.

I don’t compare my suffering – such as it has been – to the suffering of others. But I’m no stranger to injustice or fate.

4. Some reasons why I hope in the goodness of God.

But it seems to me that there is reason, in the midst of a world of evil events, to hope in a God who is good.

For example, Emil Kapaun was an American chaplain in the Korean War. He was captured. In captivity, he risked his life to steal food from the guards, to feed his starving fellow-P.O.W.’s. He sold his watch to buy a blanket, and from the blanket he made socks for prisoners in the freezing weather who had none. He encouraged others. He did such things until he died of cold and hunger.

The night after I read about Emil Kapaun, I wrestled with the idea of a god who somehow knows the billions of people living and dead -- knows them, knows everything about them, a god of vast love. From my bed, I asked "What are you God?" And suddenly I remembered Emil Kapaun, as if that were the answer. God is the God who made Emil Kapaun – made him alive and made him good; made him manifest the spirit of his maker. Maybe I can’t understand an infinite God, but I can comprehend him as expressed in his godly servant. And the expression of God in Emil Kapaun reveals a god who is good.

Another example: when I lost my mind, I also lost my confidence in my salvation. I became convinced that God had rejected me, and I believed that God was right to do so. But after a time, I had dreams that God had forgiven me. The dreams were joyful, but I did not believe them when I awoke.

Then, one day, I was in church. I had until then shunned the bread and wine of communion because of my estrangement from God; but that day, I took it. And God opened my eyes through the communion. I have described this experience in a prior post. It was on that day that I regained the hope of salvation. To believe that you are lost to God, and then to discover that you aren’t, is powerful proof of the goodness of God.

And the Bible is full of urgings to do right, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy, to care for the poor, to care for the lowly, to care for the hopeless, to care for the sick, to care for the infirm, to care for the outsider. No God who wasn’t good would be so determined to make us good.

5. A desperate grip.

But my conviction of the goodness of God does not come only from such evidence of his goodness. It comes also from a need to believe. That need is greatest when times are worst.

Pain comes regularly and in doses big enough to try my patience. The worst of those are times that I feel like I could not carry on if I did not believe in a loving and caring God. On bad days, I cling to hope in a God who will one day put things right. Days like that make me cling to his goodness with the grip of a desperate man, a man who believes that without the hope in a good God, there is no hope at all in an evil world.