No B.S Friday: Every religion has to answer this, but most don’t.
There’s one great question that every religion and every philosophy has to wrestle with:
Why.
More specifically, why is the world such a sh!tshow?
I mean, look around the world right now. War and untold displacement in the Ukraine. Floods in NSW and Queensland. And that’s on top of all the chaos of Covid.
And that’s just the newscycle this week.
How many murders and wars and famines and diseases never make it on to the front pages?
Human experience is anchored in suffering.
Yes, there is beauty and love and tasty things to eat.
But these are just garnishes on the great big bowl of suffering that life serves up to us all.
And why?
I mean, if you believe in a God, it’s hard to escape the idea that he’s a bit of a sick bastard.
Why create an entire universe calibrated to extract squeaks of suffering out of poor little humans?
Why design humans in such a way that they keep inflicting suffering on each other… and themselves.
If there is an intelligent creator, what’s the game plan here? What the hell is God getting at?
I think there are three possible answers.
One, there just is no God. This is all just a random collection of random atoms smashing into each other in ways that make interesting, but random patterns.
Maybe. You can’t disprove it. But I don’t feel it in my bones to be true.
The second option is that human suffering is just irrelevant. There are things going on here that we just don’t understand, and humans and their suffering are neither here nor there.
Like, maybe God is making a cake, and we are like grains of wheat, complaining about being ground up to make flour.
Again, possible, but I don’t find it particular satisfying, and I don’t feel that it squares away with a sense that I do have an immortal soul.
So the last answer that leaves me with is the idea that our suffering is central and an important part of the process.
Maybe we are the eyes and ears with which the Creator experiences his creation, and maybe what he wants to drink from the cup of the human soul is a particular cocktail: four fifths suffering, 1 part beauty.
Maybe beauty on its own is too sweet and cloy.
Maybe it only becomes something worth savouring when it is served in the context of suffering – in the context of impermanence, where everything and everyone we ever loved will be taken away.
And so maybe our role then is to not build dam walls against the onslaught of suffering and woe – to try and cultivate a garden of joy behind a walled fortress that keeps everything else out.
Maybe our role is to brew that strange cocktail within us – a savouring of joy with a base liqueur of suffering.
To savour what we can when we can, with full presence and full permission.
And maybe then – maybe – things might start to feel like they make sense.
JG.
Grahame Saunders says
Hi John, thanks for your continuing input to people’s lives, including mine. I started to take offence when you projected that God could be some sick bastard, however on reading further it seems that is not your belief.
I have found that God has really provided a way out of the madness of this world which He created, through personally knowing Jesus Christ. Suffering is real, yes, and creating a garden of joy (remember He tried that first) is a nice and good thing to do, but there is more He has prepared for us in the afterparty.
All the very best