NO WHY

A careful reading of Job confirms: Job’s questions of God, about why his heart is broken and why he must hurt so much and so long, are never straight-on answered. It is a dull thud in a moving book.

Have you ever avoided an outright answer to a child? Wiggled around fully explaining why because they have not the context or experience yet to comprehend? Is that what God does?

We do ask why. In day-to-day reality there is often ample reward for seeking the why. But we are not rewarded with satisfying answers when disaster happens to us or ours. We may find a pre-disaster sequence of injustices or carelessnesses, or we may not know. We can even talk about the consequence of original sin, but it does not satisfy.

Umberto Eco’s character pseudo Saint-Savin asks, “How can you call merciful a divinity that desires our eternal unhappiness only to appease his rage of an instant? We must forgive our neighbor, and he need not?” Sometimes, we each feel like that, even though we can count errors in Saint-Savin’s thinking:

1. God does not desire our eternal unhappiness, though he allows the free will to cause it for ourselves.
2. God’s wrath is not rage. His anger is controlled, and his consequences just.
3. God’s “instant” is not temporary. Each moment of time is eternity from God’s point of view.
4. God does forgive as He asks of us, and it was painful to Him. He sent a part of himself, Jesus, to suffer and die to pay for the just consequences and enable forgiveness.
5. God is bigger than Saint-Savin can imagine, bigger even than the millions of galaxies that Hubble can now show that Eco and therefore Saint-Savin did not know.
6. We all and Umberto Eco’s Saint-Savin are a small piece of a very large plan, unable to see the whole picture. We are asked to trust that it will all be worth it in the end.

For the awful, there is no why that satisfies us; we want evil undone. Once it happens, there is no use pretending the world is or could with our own effort be made all good. There will be no satisfying why. Don’t wait up torturing yourself as if you just haven’t found it yet. And yet, there is no need to put on blinders of denial. With eyes wide open, we are asked to trust, we are asked to accept our very smallness. Let the “why?” go to move on, and to cling to the one who does understand, God, in order to find that new life after.