Change of Pace
Yesterday morning when my husband was in the living room tying his shoes, I heard him chuckle. “Where are we going with all this, Honey?” he asked.
He was looking at the book lying open on the couch, the one I’d just started reading: Quantum Physics and Theology. And I was reminded that he is the vicarious reader and reliable companion through most of my passing reading obsessions. I have shared passages with him, and had long discussions with him, about most of the books I’ve been reading lately about science and faith and the Bible. Right now, intrigued by the conversations we had while I was reading The Evolution of Adam, he is reading it (and liking it!).
This companionship in reading and thinking has been one of the best surprises of marriage. He has always been a reader, and like me his reading preoccupations have changed and gone in seasons over the years . We don’t always have the same tastes or interests, but it’s always amazing to me to see the points of comparison between the different things we’re reading. As our television has grown increasingly silent over the last two years, this part of our relationship has become more and more rich.
But his question yesterday struck an answering note in me. I’ve been reading on this theme of science for awhile now, and I feel like I want to take a break — to withdraw and let it all percolate for a bit. I’m kind of on overload with the subject. And as one reader yesterday reminded me, the underlying issue is really not about science; it’s the problem of evil, which has been a preoccupation for several years now.
Why so much suffering? How to make sense of it from a faith perspective? Despite the reading I’ve done — C.S. Lewis and David Bentley Hart being the most helpful — I am still not at peace with the cruelty in the world. “The thing is, none of this reading is really amounting to much,” I told my husband last night. “I’m expending a lot of mental energy, but it’s not making me feel any better about it all. I’d like to think about something else.”
“I think you should close your books and read your Bible for awhile,” he said after a pause. “Let God make his case with you.” It isn’t an anti-reading statement. It’s an invitation to recalibrate, to re-prioritize.
This morning I got up and found a series of posts I wrote about the book of Job back in 2008. I am going to re-post them here over the next week or so, and look back into this ancient grappling with the problem of suffering. That’s not exactly taking a break from the subject, is it? But it will allow me to switch to a different mode — to retread some ground, rather than breaking new soil. And if nothing else it acts out my faith that God is the one responsible for the world’s design, and that he has communicated all that we need to know in the complex, rich, often bewildering books of nature and the Bible.
*Edited to add: Instead of re-posting my Job notes, I’ll just post this link to the “book of Job” tag. I enjoyed rereading them but don’t see the need to republish them here.
13 Comments
Ruth
The problem never goes away, and even if you have it all figured out from an intellectual point of view, that can get knocked out from under you by events in your own life or around you. More and more, I find that I just don’t have the answers. We were listening to N.T. Wright on Sunday, and he was talking about the Lisbon earthquake and how it messed up the philosophy of everyone of the period, because they thought the world was perfectly ordered, and suddenly it wasn’t. (Candide is Voltaire’s answer to all of that.)
Wish we could have a conversation for real!
Janet
Yeah, me too.
I know it’s not at the intellectual level that this is most troubling. But I’m not always sure how to go looking for solutions for heartache. The intellect is easy — there’s always another book to read. :-)
Carolin Migliazzo
I am challenged to allow God to touch all parts of me, my mind and my emotions. It is easy to remain in my head or intellect, and more challenging to sit with my emotions. Part of my journey is to live with a sense of mystery, which entails danger and uncomfortableness. CS Lewis captures this nature of God in Aslan and also in The Great Divorce when he describes arriving in heaven. I must learn to live with the mystery and my inquiring mind must learn to quiet itself in the presence of God, who is a Lion and a Lamb.
Amy
This is great, Janet. I think your dh is right, for what it’s worth.
Jeane
I don’t think you should ever become “at peace with the cruelty in the world”. The heartless way people deliberately hurt and harm each other always eats at my soul and probably always will. I think if a time comes when I can ignore that kind of behavior in my fellow-men something will have changed, hardened in me, and I don’t want to reach that place. I’ve had to stop watching news on television because of this, I am just sickened at the things people do to each other sometimes. And I would rather stay disturbed, than become used to it, if that makes sense.
Janet
I agree. Being sickened is a sign of something right in our hearts. You make a good point that it’s probably better to live with being disturbed than to act like if I can only find the proper “glasses” it will all look right.
I have had to stop watching news too, for the same reason.
Janet
I like this post by Rachel Held Evans that says basically the same thing more eloquently than I ever could:
http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/scandal-evangelical-heart
Amy
Janet–thanks for linking to the post by Held Evans. I admit I got turned off by all the controversy surrounding her and closed my mind to her a bit. While I’m still not sure she doesn’t react to/quote people out of context (like Piper in that post), I really, really like what she says, and I agree with her.
Janet
I agree that she doesn’t always play fair… but I think she is operating in a unique mode. I think of what she does often as performance art (one review I read applied that term to ‘Year of Biblical Womanhood’), aimed at getting people to think and respond and feel, and it certainly works. I think she ends up exposing some things that need to be exposed.
That Piper quote has gotten lots of attention. I’ve seen a number of bloggers take him to task for it — and I think it’s well-deserved. It seems like he MUST be either incredibly careless, or intentionally provocative, in a statement like that.
-t-
your post brings to mind the day i read, The Prisoner in the Third Cell by Gene Edwards, and the question that remainded: “Will you continue to follow this God who did not live up to your expectations?”
there’s always something to ponder in our hearts….
-t-
yes, it did for me (:
Janet
I haven’t read that, but wow — that question gets to the heart of things, doesn’t it?
Barbara H.
I love your husband’s advice. Whatever I’m reading that others have said, I feel that need to come back to the Word to recalibrate often.
I don’t know that we’ll ever have a fully satisfactory answer to suffering. The best I’ve read is Layton Talbert’s Beyond Suffering: Discovering the Message of Job. But like you said, I can get things worked out to an acceptable place in my mind, but then something else happens, or the thought of actually having to test out those theories by personal suffering unsettles me. The only thing that helps is that recalibration, going back to the Word again. I don’t always understand what He does or allows, but I can trust His character.