Archive for January, 2010
What Suffering Can Teach Us about God–and Ourselves
Of the enduring success of his book Catcher in the Rye the late J. D. Salinger said it was a living nightmare.
That sounds strange to me, a man who doesn’t have the success of a Salinger–and wouldn’t mind it.
But I think it would sound equally strange to a Haitian father who lost five children to a deadly earthquake.
Suffering Is Personal
I’ve never know devastation on the level of the Haiti earthquake.
I only know what it means to watch your father deteriorate rapidly from malignant, rapidly metastasizing lung cancer.
I only know what it means to watch a man fall 200 feet to his death in a climbing accident. [That man was my step father.]
My parents divorced when I was twelve. I’ve had my heart broken dozens of times before I married one of the most gracious person’s alive.
But I’ve never experienced devastation on the level of Haiti. And neither did Salinger.
But we can’t dismiss or minimize his pain. Or my pain. Or your pain–no matter what you’ve been through.
But neither does it really qualify us to answer the question of theodicy for other people–especially for those in Haiti.
The Worst Response to Suffering in the World
A recent BBC article asked, “Why Does God allow Natural Disasters to Occur?” Great question. Maybe.
The writer–a philosophy lecturer at the University of Glasgow–does an elegant job of covering the historical and modern arguments [and counter-arguments] for the problem of evil, but without landing on any one conviction.
Instead, he leaves you with the nagging impression that God is on trial–and things aren’t looking good for him.
Here are the facts: The universe doesn’t care about you or me. In fact, it doesn’t care about humans at all.
The universe and the earth that floats in it are nothing more than machines grinding away by impersonal forces. Sometimes those forces involve the destruction of humans.
Forces, mind you, set forth at some time by God. So we ask the question: If God is omnipotent and benevolent, why does he allow this to happen?
Why does he allow the mechanical operations of the world to destroy us? Naturally, when that question arises, it’s not God who is own trial–it’s us.
Now, I’m not big on defending more territory than I can manage, so in the long run I don’t feel obligated to answer this question.
Neither do I feel qualified.
Here’s why: outside of the aid my family has given to the survivors of the Haitian earthquake, in no way have I been involved in this tragedy.
I don’t know anyone in that country. I don’t have friends who know anyone in that country.
It’s peripheral to my existence, if you know what I mean.
In my mind, the best people to answer these questions are in Haiti. The worst, politicos and academics in America–like Lisa Miller or Pat Robertson or even me.
What We Do with Suffering
This has always intrigued me about the human race: When we see a tragedy like Haiti, we seem to absorb it all in and think this is the worst devastation WE’VE ever known.
It personally rocks our world. Is that the least bit fair–or even logical?
Sylvia Plath–a suburban mother and poet–equated her inner torment to that of the suffering of an Auschwitz Jew and thus buried her head in an oven.
She’s been criticized for co-opting Holocaust Jews’ trauma for her own.
And I think we are in danger of doing the same thing when we meditate on the meaning of a tragedy that doesn’t impact us personally–and then try to answer the so-called dilemma.
The real question is: What are people in Haiti saying? [Nod to Terry Mattingly for drawing my attention to this question.]
Haitians’ Religious Responses to the Earthquake
Emotions in Haiti range from steady faith to outright despair. One Haitian seminarian said, “You have to question your faith, but hopefully not lose it.”
Another woman cried: “This is what God did! See what God can do!”
Dudu Orelian, a Haitian man who lost a brother and nephew in the earthquake, stood outside the stone and metal rod wreckage that was once Notre Dame Cathedral of Port-au-Prince and said, ”God is angry at the world.”
Most Haitians are Christian–largely Catholic with a small but growing number of Protestants. But most also practice Voodoo–the official state religion [like Catholicism].
Regardless of their religious focus, though, they seem to say the same thing: in some measure the earthquake is the hand of God.
Rev. Eric Toussaint said, “We must recognize his power.”
Haitian-American musician Richard Morse–whose mother is a singer and Voodoo priestess–said, “If all of a sudden, in 15 seconds, 20 seconds, all the physical representations of corruption are destroyed, it gives you pause for thought.”
Indeed.
But what happens when you lose five children in the rubble? One man said, “How could He do this to us? There is no God.”
Another woman was seen tossing her Bible into a fire.
Each of these examples represents a personal response to the problem of suffering. Which brings me to my next point.
What We Can Know about God in Suffering
Pain is personal. Subjective. Non-quantifiable. Thus, immeasurable.
Does a person who lost five children in a school shooting experience any more emotional pain than a man who lost an adult son to cancer?
What about a writer tormented by the popularity his book brought him: Is that any less than a man who’s brother and nephew were killed?
No. It’s not fair to suggest that.
Neither do I think it’s entirely fair to adopt a stranger’s real tragedy to defend or object to some abstract argument.
Here’s what it all boils down to: God created man to relate to other men. To comfort them in desperate times. And in that relation, God is glorified.
That’s the pressing mandate in the wake of this horrific natural disaster.
And in the end, we know that God is neither indifferent nor ignorant of human suffering.
He put his son, Christ, on the cross to absorb the wrath of God we deserve and on the third day rose from the dead in a glorified body to announce that, indeed, it is okay to trust him and that death–the ultimate suffering–has been defeated…
And no matter the amount of pain we’ve personally experienced or torment we’ve endured, all that will one day be wiped away when we enter God’s everlasting presence.
That, ironically, is the ultimate answer to the problem of pain. And remember, I’m the worst person–the least qualified–in this case, to answer the question.
But it’s being asked. And I’m offering what little I have. Let me know what you think.
The Puddle: An Elegant but Not-Perfect Analogy
When it comes to criticizing the fine-tuning argument, Douglas Adam’s puddle analogy takes the cake.
Adams first unveiled this analogy at a 1998 lecture at Digital Biota.
Since then it’s become the darling of the scientific community.
Richard Dawkins quoted it during an eulogy for Adams.
P Z Meyers been known to toss it around.
And occassionally skeptics and atheists will trot it out here on this blog.
Case in point: During an interview with an atheist named Billy, I asked, “What do you think of the fine-tuning argument?”
Billy gave a thoughtful, but rather unforgettable answer to my question, especially since someone else chimed in with this piece of snarky brevity: “Nonsense. Google Douglas Adams ‘puddle argument.”
That caught my attention because he seemed to imply Adam’s “puddle argument” was a show stopper.
I have to admit: I was spellbound.
What Is the Puddle Analogy?
Unfortunately, it took me about seven months to actually get around to looking up this “puddle argument.”
But I finally did.
In fact, I not only read the analogy, but I also watched a Dawkin’s video, read Adam’s original transcript in which the analogy was embedded…and even skimmed an objection.
But I didn’t get it. I was at a loss to what he meant by “non-sense.” And how exactly was this a show stopper?
Adams analogy is emotionally compelling [which I'll explain in a minute], no doubt. But not sure what it proves. Or why it’s so convincing.
Are people putting more weight on it than it can hold? That was my hunch. So I decided to find out.
Asking More Questions about the Puddle Analogy
The following day I emailed the original poster and let him know I finally did what he told me to do but wasn’t sure what he was getting at. I asked him if he could clarify. Here’s his response:
I think it quite accurately exposes the foolishness of the fine-tuning argument without any appeal to emotion in the same way as Russell’s teapot or the FSM expose the flaws of other religious arguments.
Okay. But how? He replied:
By showing that fitting an environment well is no reason to think you were designed for it, it designed for you, or that both were designed with each other in mind. The analogy of the puddle shows that quite well since clearly holes aren’t intelligently designed for puddles, regardless of what a puddle might like to think.
Okay. That makes sense. It illustrates that well. But how does it prove anything? I didn’t think that was the job of a parable. In truth, it’s not.
The Purpose of a Parable
What is a parable? A parable is nothing more than a short tale illustrating a moral lesson or some truth.
Think Paley’s Watchmaker or Jesus’ Prodigal Son or Aesop’s Fables.
But the parable themselves are not truth. They illustrate some truth you already hold. In other words, parables and analogies are built on presuppositions…
You are assuming something is already true. All you are doing with a parable is helping somebody understand that presupposition.
Let me give you an example.
An Example of a Biblical Parable
In the Prodigal Son parable the loving response of the human father to the son who returns after a period of wasteful living is an allegory of the love of God for the repentant sinner.
Our presupposition is that God exists.
In Adams’ puddle analogy, our presupposition is that the universe isn’t designed for life.
In both cases, we need to prove our presuppositions. A parable doesn’t do that on it’s own. And that’s what I mean when I say a parable can’t carry the weight of an argument but is instead an emotionally satisfying story that demonstrates something we already believe.
Another Problem with Parables
Furthermore, just like Paley’s Watchmaker analogy, Adams’ puddle argument makes arbitrary designations.
Why a puddle in a hole? Why not a blue jay finding another bird’s nest? Or a billiard ball falling into a pool pocket?
The variations are infinite.
Bottom line, I sincerely don’t think Adam’s intended his analogy to be adopted as a proof.
He’s smarter than that.
He intended it to be a moral lesson. He said as much when he concluded his analogy: “I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”
Indeed, the world gives us mixed messages. And we often see what we want to see. This applies for both theist and atheist.
So I couldn’t agree more with Adams’ warning. But what do you think? Did I miss something? I’d like to develop this thought further.
Psst…Karr? This Sex Scene Is a Really Bad Idea
What do you do with a memoir that details in four pages a graphic display of child molestation?
What if its the author as a young child that’s the subject…
Does that change the make up of the story from autobiography to something more sinister–like pornography?
Does it matter that this is an event in the past? Does it make it any less real or problematic?
Those were some of the questions I asked myself as I finished reading Mary Karr’s 1995 memoir The Liar’s Club.
The book was Karr’s first memoir [she's since written two more--Cherry and Lit--I've read neither of them] and the idea to write it came from her friend Tobias Wolfe.
In her own words, Carr said it was an agonizing task that involved a mountain of emotional labor–not just to revisit dark places but to merely get the words on the page. Here she is in a Salon interview:
“I would lie down on the floor and go to sleep after about an hour and a half’s work. Literally go to sleep like I had been driving all night. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I went to a shrink and said, ‘Am I repressing something, bah bah bah bah.’ And she said, ‘Well, I think you are just really exhausted by it.’”
Fortunately, her herculean effort paid off.
The Essence of The Liar’s Club
She wrote a compelling, hilarious and haunting autobiography about growing up as a child in Leechfield, Texas–oil refinery country–raised by a hard-working, hard-drinking, but sturdy and surprisingly gentle father who managed to marry a displaced New Yorker living on the outskirts of madness.
The book ended up being a runaway bestseller–a justified judgment given the quality of the writing and a decent payoff for the task of exposing herself.
But the question is–did she go too far?
In Carr’s defense, as a child she played the hand she was dealt–and as a child that’s sometimes all you can do.
What you get is a gritty, foul-mouthed eight-year-old girl who fought hard for survival and security, revenge and love–things hard to come by when you have a mother who’s head is in a perennial cloud of vodka, methamphetamine diet pills, suspect men, brooding jazz and fatalistic literature.
So it comes as no surprise when I tell you that Karr’s mother lacked a woeful amount of judgment, most clearly seen in her decision to allow questionable men to babysit her daughters.
The scene was terrible. And you saw it like a dark storm slowly sweeping in from the sea. At one point I wondered if Carr was going to actually go there. Or would she pull out early enough to avoid the explicit?
I had hope she’d pull out. Earlier in the book Carr handled a case of rape very sympathetically without giving an uncomfortable amount of detail.
That’s why it surprised me that she dove into this particular scene with no holds barred.
Where I’d Like to Have Not Gone
At least that’s my guess because the moment I saw where she was going and had no intention of stopping, I bailed and counted the pages before the scene was over.
Four pages.
Granted, as I quickly skimmed the pages looking for the end (it came, by the way, when the chapter ended) the scene covered mostly emotional territory, like her mental activity during the event.
And I’m glad to say she never revisited the topic again.
But here’s the deal: This scene would NEVER make it to the movie screen. In fact, if you owned a video of this event, you’d be arrested.
Why, then, is it okay in a book? I argue it’s not. It permits us to go to dark places we should never visit.
Naturally, this uncorks a litany of problems, namely censorship. But should the world thank Mary Carr for “going there” on this particular topic and being candid about it?
No.
All this does is allow us to inch our moral boundaries back, calibrated by our sense of appropriate indiscretion–and that’s, unfortunately, what you get when you don’t have absolute boundaries.
Gore Vidal–who defended cannabis laws–once said that some people should be told not to do drugs.
I agree. And the same goes for morality. Mary Karr’s book would’ve been a runaway bestseller without this scene.
A curious–if not disturbing–side note about the The Liar’s Club is it’s viewed as the book that jump-started the memoir explosion. Naturally, in it’s wake we have self-expression without guardrails.
One has to wonder where this will take us if we don’t provide those boundaries.
Why Creative People Frighten Me
It all started with an image of Carlos Whittaker posing in an ad on Michael Hyatt’s blog.
It wasn’t so much that he was posing–but that look he had on his face…
And his body posture.
At first blush, innocuous. Bland. Marginally detached.
Nothing to cause alarm or concern. It’s just a photograph promoting Whittaker’s EP.
But the thing got under my skin. In a low-grade BAD way. For days even.
The thing is, I couldn’t really put my finger on why it bothered me so much. It just made me go–ick.
And it wasn’t a dislike for Whittaker or his music. I knew that much. No, it went to the core of something else.
Something deeper. In my own being. Or our culture’s soul. Or both. I just didn’t know until the mystery started to unfold.
Disturbing Photographs of Disturbed Poets
I have a book on my shelf called Eight American Poets.
It’s a slim anthology on Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg and James Merrill–poets who characterize the 20th century’s “second brilliant generation.”
[...the first generation being Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Hughes,Stevens, and Williams...]
On the cover–as you might suspect–are photographs of each poet…all of them, except Ginsberg, staring at you.
It’s disturbing on many levels.
First, human eyes staring at you are strange things indeed. Photographs of human eyes staring at you even more odd. Photographs of eyes staring at you that belong to dead people–haunting.
But photographs of human eyes staring at you that belonged to dead people who, when alive, led very creative, but disturbed lives takes the cake.
These are such photographs. And it doesn’t help that I’ve got history with these poets. Let me explain.
The Powerful Impact of Disturbed Poets
Long ago as a moody, half-cocked young poet I fell for Sylvia Plath. Adored Anne Sexton. Admired James Merrill. Cherished Theodore Roethke. Envied Robert Lowell. And idolized John Berryman.
The only poet who I spurned was Allen Ginsberg and that was due to his pedophilic tendencies.
But the others I’d canonized. Bizarre since these poets lived and died tragic lives.
Three of the poets killed themselves–Plath, Berryman and Sexton.
Lowell made a career out of writing candid poetry about his multiple mental hospitals admissions.
Bishop lived the life of a recluse with her lover in South America.
Theodore Roethke endured crippling episodes of depression.
And James Merrill, who painted a candid portrait of gay life in the early 1950s, lived modestly despite great personal wealth and eventually died in Arizona from AIDS complications.
You wonder why I–or anyone for that matter–invested so much hope and emotional capital into such people.
But here’s the deal: These troubling writers powerfully shaped my mind. And drug me to dark places I’d rather not go. Which brings us back to Whittaker.
What Does This Have to Do with Carlos Whittaker?
When it comes to romantic poetry and rock n roll both are at their best when they come from emotionally raw places says Craig Schuftan in his book Hey Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone.
Take the former Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan, for example. He said, ”And the more intense it was, the better, and we would probably have to suffer for that.”
Then there’s the British romantic poet George Gordon Byron who said about Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage–perhaps his best poem–”I was truly mad during its composition.”
[Note: Before Byron the notion that you had to suffer to create great art seemed ridiculous.]
Unfortunately, this notion is leaching into the Christian culture. Whittaker is but a mild example.
So my question to you is this: Is this the least bit healthy–regardless if you are a Christian or not? Furthermore, does it belong in the Christian community?
Or is this just anonther example of our incumbent narcissism rearing it’s ugly head and placing the focus on us rather than Christ?
Understand: I am one of those creative people. And I have a bent for suffering. But I’m not sure the focus should be placed on me or my pain.
I’m also reminded of Keith Green performing beneath his piano so people would focus on God and not him.
My irredeemable love of obscurity likes that. A lot.
So what do you think: Is this a zero-sum game? Or can we strike a balance? I look forward to your thoughts. Brutal and all.
5 Posts to Make You Wise [A Reading Primer]
Reading is the cheapest and easiest way to grow your brain.
Cheap because you can get most books at your local library–or at Google Books.
And easy because you can learn about the history of gravity…
The political career of George Washington…
Or Augustine’s view of free will from your favorite reading chair.
That’s why I put such a high premium on reading. And spend a smidgen of time here writing about reading.
With that in mind, here are five posts on how to get the most out of your reading routine.
How to Absorb a Book into Your Bloodstream
One of the most important rules when it comes to reading.
How to Abandon a Book
You probably didn’t know this, but there’s an instinct to abandoning a book. An instinct you can develop.
How Do You Read?
Narrow, wide or something completely different? Share your reading style with me.
How to Read a 291-Page Book in 2 Hours
Want to read more books in less time–and even catch up on the classics you’ve missed? Try chapter pacing.
Drop-Dead Easy Guide on How to Journal
Twenty cool and easy tricks on how to get started with your journal. [A guide for those who don't want to spoil the pages of their books with a pencil.]
Granted, reading alone won’t make you wise. But it’s a start. By the way, do you have any reading tips? Please share.
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