BETTER THAN ANGELS

Frank Carpenter, St. John’s Unitarian Universalist Church,

Cincinnati, OH

May 28, 2006

 

Ten years after UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, Harriet Beecher Stow published another novel. THE MINISTER’S WOOING was almost as unprecedented in the religious life of the United States as UNCLE TOM’S CABIN had been in the political life.  One of her biographer’s remarking THE MINISTER’S WOOING was the beginning of a more liberal and emotional life in religion in the country.

 

The novel was written in response to the death of Stowe’s son Henry.  Henry was a student at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, NH, where he drowned on an outing. Stowe recounts that “While I was visiting in Hanover, where Henry died, a poor, deaf old slave woman, who has still five children in bondage, came to comfort me.  “Bear up, dear soul, she said; you must bear it, for the Lord loves ye.” (page 9)

 

This identification of the old slave woman with Stowe is central to the plot of THE MINISTER’S WOOING.  Set in colonial Newport, RI, the son of a prosperous merchant family is lost at sea.  Upon news of his loss, his mother becomes despondent, afraid her beloved son will be banished to hell.  The minister of the novel was Samuel Hopkins, a disciple of Jonathan Edwards who preached a forbidding view of god, prepared to drop humanity into hell.  Stowe was raised in this gloomy theology, which taught that since her son Henry was unconverted, he would be cast into hell and she would be eternally separated from him.  In this crisis of faith Stowe wrote THE MINISTER’S WOOING.

 

In the novel, only a black slave woman, Candace, can help the lost boy’s mother.  In comforting her, Candace goes beyond the comfort that Stowe received, to ask what kind of God was she afraid of.  Was it the gloomy God of orthodoxy, or a loving God?  Candace asks:

Honey, darlin’ ye a’ni’t right, -- dar’s a drefful mistake somewhere, […] Why de Lord a’n’t like what ye tink, -- He loves ye, honey, why jes’ feel how I loves ye, -- poor old black Candace, -- an’ I a’n’t better’n Him as made me!

 

“The Lord isn’t what you think.”  Is the Lord less than an old slave woman? 

 

 

When bad things happen, we often ask why bad things happen to good people.  Did God make these bad things happen?  What kind of God would drown a young boy?  What kind of God would cast an innocent soul into eternal hell fire?

 

Perhaps by the time we are adults, we’ve sorted these question out enough so that only trouble us at times.  We’ve answered them for ourselves, or so we think, or we’ve just decided to avoid the whole speculative maze.

 

But they come up.  I have conversations with parents whose children ask about God. Your giving them a bath, and a voice out of the soapy tub asks, why a friend died.  Why did God make his friend die?  How do you know She did, a parent might be tempted to respond.  Many of our children are a religious minority.  They attend schools where the old time gloomy theology stills paralyzes the minds of so many people today.  How can you not freeze up if you fear that god is going to get you for almost anything:  whom you go to bed with, whether you wear shorts. If you do a count, there are well over 600 commandments in the Old Testament.  Who has ever kept them all?

 

If your child has fundamentalists as classmates, or in another branch of the family, she may ask you why do bad things happen to good people.  You might answer, ‘why not?’  But over past millennia, numerous complications have been added on to simple answers.

If you are a polytheist, that some god or another is messing with you is commonplace. Some other god helps makes things better.  My favorite god of the various polytheisms is Kuan Yin; whose names means, ‘she who hears the cry of suffering.’ Kuan Yin is often considered to be a female manifestation of Amida Buddha - who also manifests as the thousand armed, thousand eyed Buddha who 'looks' simultaneously in a thousand directions for suffering whilst offering a thousand arms of assistance. [ http://www.soton.ac.uk/~maa1/chi/kuon/kuanintro.htm ]

Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are monotheistic, advocating belief in only one god.  Just why monotheism is superior I’m not sure but the Greek philosophers seemed to think it a good idea. In any case, monotheism is usually argued to be superior to polytheism. But that seems to be the point.  Feminist theologians, such as Mary Daly, have been put off by monotheistic religions as they seem to go hand in hand with patriarchal religions, one in the same.

One of the main problems with monotheism is called the problem of evil.  Why do bad things happen to good people?  If God’s in charge, why do bad things happen?  Why did Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son drowned? Why would he be damned eternally, if God is infinite and man finite? As Stowe’s novel reveals, these questions cause anguish to many, and for the most daring, suffering, evil brings them to rethink what God might be.    “Why de Lord a’n’t like what ye tink,” as Candace comforted the grieving mother. Sometimes these efforts to maintain God’s omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and infinite love led to the construction of elegant theologies of many volumes, but in retrospect look like Rube Goldberg devices.

There are times in all our lives when these are not speculative questions.  As a part of my pastoral work, I am often called upon to hear the cry of suffering of people in grief. One of the more difficult times for me was when a family in the church where I was serving lost a new born baby.  The baby had come home healthy and happy.  However, in a very few days, a flesh eating bacteria, perhaps contracted in the hospital, took the child from their loving arms.

It fell to me to lead the memorial service.  I will say that the high point for me was a friend of the family and church member playing Ashokan Farewell as an interlude in the service. I talked for a while, but really felt very much at a loss.  The heart of what I had to say is one of the stories told of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.

One day as the Buddha was teaching, a young woman approached the Buddha with her dead two year old child in her arms.  She asked the Buddha for some medicine to save her child.  Yes, the Buddha responded, he would give her some medicine, if she would bring him a mustard seed from a family where no child, no mother or father had died.

She eagerly set out on her search, sure of finding such a seed quickly. Much later, much much later, she finally buried her child and began to think about life and death.  She returned to the Buddha, who asked if she had found the mustard seed.  Upon hearing her answer, the Enlightened One responded:

"All the objects of this world are perishable and impermanent. This world is full of miseries, troubles and tribulations. Man or woman is troubled by birth, death, disease, old age and pain. We should gain wisdom from experience. We should not expect for things that do not and will not happen. This expectation leads us to unnecessary misery and suffering.    http://www.dlshq.org/saints/buddha.htm

It is the first teaching of the Buddha, the place he begins, to say that bad things happen to good people.   Well…., what he says is that stuff happens.  As Scott Peck wrote:

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult--once we truly understand and accept it--then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

After the great Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, CNN interviewed a number of religious leaders on what their teachings said to comfort their people.  A robed Buddhist monk in Los Angels, who had come from Sri Lanka, smiled diffidently, and responded “The Buddha teaches that all life is impermanent.”  “Go Buddhism,” I thought.

To the answer, why do bad things happen, the Buddha might say, Why not?  He was against speculation about the cause of things.  The First Nobel Truth of his teachings is life is suffering, as dukka is often translated. I prefer the word ‘grief.’  The question is not why, but what are you going to do about it.  In her sermon some weeks ago, THE UNTHINKING SEA, Bonnie Meyer remarked, “I argue that we must begin our theology with theodicy, that is, the problem of evil and suffering in the world.” And if you explore it a bit, that’s why we have religions.  We have religions because we have to respond to suffering, respond to evil.  As Rabbi Kushner concluded WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE, the more significant question is not ‘why?’ but, “When bad things happen to good people…?”  How do we respond to evil, bad times?

How do we respond to evil, suffering?  How do YOU respond?

There is no simple answer.  Consider the Jewish holocaust the last century.  I have always been struck by the response of many to the holocaust.  All too often, what we have heard is “Never again.”  ‘Never again!’  Never again would the Jewish people suffer as they did under Hitler.

This effort however to rid the world of suffering, sin and evil seems to rebound.  The Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote, “The greatest of tyrannies are all … based on the postulate that there should never be any sin.”  [GANDHI AND THE ONE-EYED GIANT, page 14]  Given the logic of this it is not surpassing that those who argue, ‘never again,’ have set up for the Palestinian people a very oppressive regime. 

Not all Jewish people have responded this way.  Rabbi Michael Lerner of the TIKKUN community sees in the holocaust not just a Jewish problem, but a human problem.  Genocide was practiced not just on the Jews.  Preparing to wipe out European Jewry, Hitler’s minions went to Turkey to see how the Armenians had been wiped out.  Genocide is a human problem, not just a Jewish one.  Not long ago I heard a group of Jewish people had gone to the Killing Fields of Cambodia to give aid to the victims of Pol Pot.  As far as I have been able to figure out, that’s the kind of lesson I take from the holocaust. One of my moral axioms comes from Albert Camus.  In a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, Albert Camus suggests, not to be on the side of the executioners.

Perhaps this is the fundamental moral choice we each have: which side are you one?  The executioners, or the victims?

So we have this choice: we are free to choose.  It is in this that we can choose our response to suffering that we are ‘better than angels,’ as the religious philosopher John Hicks remarks. Hicks, as do many Christian theologians, have found in human free will, an adequate answer to why God allows evil in the universe.  If we were not free to choose between good and evil, then we would not be truly free.

I think that makes some sense, but it doesn’t cut it for me.  Yes, we have free will, we make moral choices.  But the choices are not always good.  I remember one time when I was serving several churches in Texas, I heard a talk by a theologian at a District Meeting in Dallas.  Schubert Ogden was a professor at the theological school of Southern Methodist University, and a process theologian.  Process theology is as favored as any by Unitarian Universalist ministers and avoids the really hard questions, asserting, sort of as Kazantzaksi did in our reading, that God is growing through our experience.

During the question and answer period after his talk, Ogden was asked if there were anything that would prove to him that God did not exist. He thought a minute, and answered, nuclear holocaust, if all humanity were destroyed. 

If we focus not on whether god exists, but our response to suffering, free will means we can choose which side to be on, the side of the oppressed, or on the side of the oppressors.  The choice then, is between arming ourselves so that the bad things never happen again, or learning about ourselves and the world.  When bad things happen, do we deny them?  Or can we see them as learning opportunities; chances for growth?  As has been asked, can you make lemonade when you get lemons?  The religious philosophers call it soulmaking.  John Hicks argues that god permits evil here for we have free will. We are better than angels: we can grow, and evil functions to challenge us to grow

Whether Hicks is right or not, we cannot avoid the question of how to respond. Can we learn?  Consider the elderly slave woman who responded to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s grief.  From her own experience, she grasped what Stowe was going though, the loss of a beloved child.  The black woman, whose name is unknown to us, identified with the white woman, and in the identification helped Harriet Beecher Stowe begin to make sense of her loss.

Is it possible for you to believe that no matter how bad it gets for you, you will learn something that will be of use to someone else when they get into the same trouble? Soulmaking may seem impossible at times, but no matter what happens to you, the loss of a job, the loss of a child, can be, IF YOU CHOOSE IT TO BE SO, IF YOU CHOOSE TO GROW, it will make you better able to hear the cries of others’ grief.

The basic principle of morality is the Golden Rule.  Found in all faiths, it is based on our ability to identify with one another.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  If you cannot identify with others, if you do not imagine what it is like to walk in their shoes, you will not practice the Golden Rule.  Through imagination, through deepening our own experience, we begin to understand what is meant by the remark, “There but for the Grace of God, go I.”  If we identify with others, we slowly begin to find the unity of all things, that indeed, all humanity is one, as has been taught for ages,

Albert Einstein was fascinated by Mohandas Gandhi. He watched newsreel after newsreel of Gandhi's doings in India. Having seen Gandhi greet people in the street with his hands placed together, as if in prayer, and with a bow, he wondered what Gandhi was saying. Einstein wrote Gandhi and asked him what he was saying. The simple reply: "Namaste." Einstein then wrote again to ask the meaning of this Hindu word, "Namaste", and the reply was: "I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides. I honor the place in you of light, love, truth, peace and wisdom. I honor the place in you where, when you are in that place, and I am in that place, there is only one of us."

Namaste: I salute the divine within you.