Just finished watching “My Demon” not too long ago. Its common now for shows to poke fun at religion while at the same time subtly raising real questions that people struggle with about faith. And sure enough, one line in the show stuck with me. In the show, God chose to manifest on earth in the form of a female hobo. She would have conversations with the demon. One of the things she said (paraphrased) was that “I can’t have the same emotions and empathy as humans. Otherwise, I would go mad.”
That line immediately (and also predictably) caught my attention, as my struggle with faith has so much to do with the relevance and immediacy of God in my life. I’ve always been taught that He knows my struggles, He grieves with me in my pain and celebrates with me in my victories. He’s always been portrayed as someone with an overwhelming ability to know how I feel. Yet I find myself wondering if its an empathetic knowledge, or is it merely a clinical omniscience of how I feel.
I see the kind of pain this world is in. The war torn and poverty stricken. Those who lost their loved ones to disease and illness. The injustice and imbalance of power and money in the world. The futility of all our struggles, and even our accomplishments. And ever since I was a kid, I had the same thought as so many others: “If I had the power to change all this and make it better, I would.” After all, it takes a special kind of hardness of heart to watch a friend’s dying parent struggling so much with pain and suffering as disease wracked his body and take away every last shred of his human dignity. Who could stand by and do nothing when something can be done?
Yet so often, it seems that God does.
Sure, we like to come up with all sorts of rhetoric. We like to say that all the pain is temporary and shall pass, and we shall eventually bask in the bliss of eternity with God. We even like to preach about how pain brings us closer to God and makes us stronger. We come up with purposes and meaning for all the pain and suffering in the world. We also blame it on the sinfulness and corruption of humanity, and absolve God of any blame on what we see.
NONE OF THAT IS WRONG.
I understand. And I can see how that works.
But it doesn’t answer the question of “who could stand by and do nothing when something can be done?” When all the Jews were crying out as they were gassed to death in the concentration camps, what kind of being could blithely choose to not intervene when its in His power to stop such a terrible thing from happening? All the rhetoric I’ve read answer some questions, but it also leaves many more questions begging to be answered.
And church has been very good at directing you to only ask question where they’ve carefully crafted answers for. For any question outside the box, we turn to the get-out-of-jail card: “His ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts.”
In other words, shut up because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Just accept that He’s way smarter than you, and He knows what He’s doing. Since He died for you, you don’t get to question how much He loves you. So just keep His sacrifice for you firmly in mind, and all the other questions you have will fade into the pale.
Lately I have found myself asking how I should go about understanding the empathy of God. We are told He knows our pain. The evergreen Footprints reminds us that he carried us in my pain and our struggles. Yet when I apply my own limited human understanding to what that empathy means, I find myself circling back to the question of “who could stand by and do nothing when something can be done?”
And that’s why the line in My Demon struck such a deep chord in me. Because it resonated with the question I’ve been asking. Is that really how it works? God’s empathy is not how I have always understood it to be? He needs to wall off that horror which drives the impulse to do something when unspeakable atrocities are being committed. He needs to not feel that overwhelming compassion to take pity when He sees the disease ravaged crying out to Him for healing. He chooses to see eternity as the end game, and therefore what happens to us now is merely part of the journey. Just go through the pain as a rite of passage and you’ll eventually come out to paradise on the other side.
That’s a really terrifying image of the God that I worshipped. Even parents on earth have a threshold when it comes to their children. We know they need to go through hardship, and we know they need to learn some things the hard way. But we don’t want it to cost them literally their life, or their limbs. We don’t want them to be driven mentally unwell by it. So parents will intervene when they see that its taking a severe toll on the children, so that they can live to fight another day as a whole and well being.
But when God acts the way He does, the result sometimes is the loss of faith. Eternal separation from God. It’s a permanent loss. Yet He does not deem that too high a price to pay. Instead, we are taught it’s a system He uses to sieve out those who are do not belong to Him. (Of course, I would be opening a whole new can of worms and also digressing too much if I go into the question of what constitutes as “someone who belongs to Him.” So I shall not go there.) So when people ask “where is God in the midst of all the madness in the world today?”, it still remains one of the hardest question to answer. Of course, its easy to sit in one’s ivory tower and discourse on the topic. But when you are staring at a suffering person in the face, the question becomes impossible to answer. After all, if you can still throw the theological discourse at such a person’s face, that’s when you will probably lose that person for Christ forever.
So this
perhaps, is what I shall be mulling over for this year in 2024. What is the
compassion of God, and how does it work in the immediacy of this broken and
suffering world?
