Probably won't finish until tomorrow. But, need to start.
This thread, as quite a few do, gets interesting.
In order to honor ER's plea, I am shifting attention here, if for no other reason that I think Feodor's rather childish non-response response to the on-going discussion deserves an honest reply.
First, as a general rule, rage at God is neither new nor interesting, at least to me. The desire for a recognition of our common humanity, for the suffering caused in large measure by our own greed and lack of care for our fellow human beings is one I certainly share.
Yet, I cannot but think that "a pox on all your houses because you're not as angry as I am" is only a childish ranting at the silence of history and universe in the face of the real desire for us to acknowledge that we cause the innocent to die.
At what point does a recognition that we all share in a responsibility for the lives of our fellow human beings become a substitute for acting to change that? At what point do we surrender the explicit necessity to make the world a little more just, a little more humane, for the satisfaction of being right?
I have no need to justify my faith, my actions, or my words, before Feodor's tribunal of self-proclaimed prophetic utterance. His remarks are, for the most part, banal and trivial. His concerns, on the other hand are not.
He offered the silence of God in the face of humanity's propensity for profound evil as a challenge to the proclamation that God speaks. God is silent. God is speaking. It is never either/or. It is always both/and. The world will not, does not, and cannot alter its course because we stand over the broken bodies of our children, our parents, our brothers and sisters - even those we will never meet - and scream out our rage to the silence around us. That shriek certainly satisfies our refusal to take it lying down; stopping there, though, is petulance.
Which is why Wiesel, for all his profundity, does not satisfy. Ditto Richard Rubenstein, Richard Dawkins, or Feodor. Petulance is unbecoming. As a professor of mine in college remarked, shit or get off the pot. More than anything else, that sums up my approach to the Christian faith. Either get in the game, or get out of it; kibitzing from the sidelines about how we're all wrong, about how we are all missing the point, about our own faults and failures, is a distraction.
The suffering of today's unfortunates is no different in kind from the sufferings of millions over the course of human history. Misery has been the lot of the vast majority of human beings. So has God's love for them even in the midst of that misery. Occasionally, that love was brought to life in a parish priest offering the sacrament, or some folks offering bread or soup. Even a radical who demanded that the entire order be reset to end that misery. Since time hasn't stopped, history marches on, and human beings are imperfect and as bound to hate as to love, the question of suffering will go on. The answer, as far as my very limited abilities and vision can tell, is that love is stronger than death. It may not be much.
It may, though, be just about everything.
Virtual Tin Cup
