I phoned my cousin yesterday. I knew that she was going to say, “I am gutted.” I understand why.
Life sucks. Here she was, restricted, owing to travel bans, from seeing her children and grandchildren (one of whom she has never seen) for more than two years. A week ago that had all changed: the bans had been lifted, her children were flying out for Christmas, she was making plans.
A week later that joy has been crushed. The bans are back, the flights cancelled, the plans obliterated.
My cousin was brought up in a large family. She knows how much fun family can be, but she also knows that it’s not a trip on autopilot: unconditional love and effort go into making it that way. She has put a lot into life, only to have it turn on her and push her into the ditch. Here’s the equation: an opportunity for gladness makes for a situation of sadness.
Don’t give life wriggle-room by suggesting ways of coping. That’s just setting yourself up for another disappointment. A grin-and-bear-it face signals acceptance of life’s abysmally low standard. And if religion tries to pass the buck on to original sin and the fallen world we live in, why make us faulty to start with? That’s another case of setting us up for a hiding.
Life has let my cousin down, badly. She does not have a right to be disappointed: she has a duty to.
Indeed. Fundamentalists and their buck-passing (as you put it), by blaming the World’s imperfections on that mythical “Fall.” They irritate me.
About two years ago, in my blog, I was examining this issue. I wrote then “No, the mythical Fall is not responsible for having brought pain, suffering and death into the world: these things were designed into Creation by their author. But was their author necessarily God? Or is another responsible for material creation? Do I in fact worship a God who is no more responsible for this flawed material reality than I am? Is this the image in which we share with God: our own hurt and outrage at the vast scale of suffering that underlies this material creation, mirrors the hurt and outrage of God Himself?”
I then wrote “Or has (God) perhaps grown tired, with fading powers, engaged in a losing struggle to reclaim a creation that was stolen aeons ago by the Prince of this World?
It does not seem to me that God, if He is Creator, can bear no share of responsibility for “setting us up for a hiding.”
To counter the angry tone of my earlier comment, allow me to bear witness to God’s grace:
The love I bear Him has nothing to do with my head; it wells up from my heart. I can think myself into Hell if I am not careful. Thinking results in comments like that I posted earlier; there is no mention in it of God’s love, which I feel every single day of my life. God answers my prayers; He has cared for me and protected me for many years, and He blesses me. This He does because I acknowledge that Jesus is my Lord.
There are fundamental mysteries in Creation: I waste my spiritual energies in trying to plumb their depths, and sometimes I come dangerously close to peering through Hell’s gates. Rather, I will remember to give thanks; to have faith, and to love Him, my good God.