Harold S. Kushner
Like most people, my wife and I had grown up with an image of God as an all-wise, all-powerful parent figure who would treat us as our earthly parents did, or even better. If we were obedient and deserving, He would reward uss. If we got out of line, He would discipline us, reluctantly but firmly. He would protect us from being hurt or from hurting ourselves, and would see to it that we got what we deserved in life.
...
Then came that day in the hospital when the doctor told us about Aaron and explained what progeria meant. It contradicted everything I had been taught. I could only repeat over and over again in my mind, "This can't be happening. It is not how the world is supposed to work." Tragedies like this were supposed to happen to selfish, dishonest people whom I, as a rabbi, would then try to comfort by assuring them of God's forgiving love. How could it be happening to me, to my son, if what I believed about the world was true?
page 3, paragraphs 1&3
One of the way's in which people have tried to make sense of the world's suffering in every generation has been by assuming that we deserve what we get, that somehow our misfortunes come as punishment for our sins:
page 9, paragraph 1, lines 1-4
It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve. Be believing that, we keep the world orderly and understandable. We give people the best possible reason for being good and for avoiding sin. And by believing that, we can maintain an image of God as all-loving, all-powerful and totally in control. Given the reality of human nature, given the fact that none of us is perfect and that each of us can, without too much difficulty, think of things he has done which he should have not done, we can always find grounds for justifying what happens to us. But how comforting, how religiously adequate, is such an answer.
page 9, paragraph 2, lines 2-14
The idea that God gives people what they deserve, that our misdeeds cause our misfortune, is a neat and attractive solution to the problem of evil at several levels, but it has a number of serious limitations. As we have seen, it teaches people to blame themselves. It creates guilt even when there is no basis for guilt. It makes people hate God, even as it makes themselves. And most disturbing of all, it does not even fit the facts
Perhaps if we had lived before the era of mass communications, we could have believed this thesis, as many intelligent people of centuries did.
page 10, paragraphs 2&3, lines 1--3
I think of an acquaintance of mine who built up a modestly successful business through many years of hard work, only to be driven into bankruptcy when he was cheated by a man he had trusted. I can tell him that the victory of evil over good is only temporary, that the other person's evil ways will catch up to him. But in the meantime, my acquaintance is a tired, frustrated man, no longer young, and grown cynical about the world. Who will send his children to college, who will pay the medical bills, that go with advancing age, during the years it takes for God's justice to catch up with him?
page 14, paragraph 1, lines 1-10
Often, victims of misfortune try to console themselves with the idea that God has His reasons for making this happen to them, reasons that they are in no position to judge.
page 14, paragraph 2, lines 1-3
How seriously would we take a person who said, "I have faith in Adolf Hilter, or in John Dilinger. I can't explain why they did the things they did, but I can't believe they would have done them without a good reason." Yet people try to justify the deaths and tragedies God inflicts on innocent victims with almost these same words.
page 19, paragraph 1
If a human artist or employer made children suffer so that something immensely impressive or valuable could come to pass, we would put him in prison. Why then should we excuse God for causing such undeserved pain, no matter how wonderful the ultimate result may be?
page 19, paragraph 2, lines 5-10
She remembers that when her young son died during an operation to correct a congenital heart malfunction, her clergyman took her aside and said, "I know that this is a painful time for you. But I know that you will get through it all right, because God never sends us more of a burden than we can bear. God only let this happen to you because He knows that you are strong enough to handle it." Harriet Schiff remembers her reaction to those words: "If only I was a weaker person, Robbie would still be alive."
page 25, paragraph 4, lines 2-11
When all else fails, some people try to explain suffering by believing that it comes to liberate us from a world of pain and lead us to a better place. I received a phone call one day informing me that a five-year boy in our neighborhood had run into the street after a ball, had been hit by a car and killed. I didn't know the boy; his family was not a part of the congregation. But several children from the congregation had known him and played with him. Their mothers attended the funeral, and some of them told me about it afterwards.
In the eulogy, the family's clergyman had said, "This is not a time for sadness or tears. This is a time for rejoicing, because Michael has been taken out of this world of sin and pain with his innocent soul unstained by sin, He is in a happier land now where there is on pain and no grief; let us thank God for that."
I heard that, and I felt so bad for Michael's parents. Not only had they lost a child without warning, they were being told by the representative of their religion that they should rejoice in the fact that he had died so young and innocent, and I couldn't believe that they felt much like rejoicing at that moment. They felt hurt, they felt angry, they felt that God had been unfair them, and here was God's spokesman telling them to be grateful to God for what had happened.
page 26, paragraph 2 & pages 27, paragraphs 1&2
All the responses to tragedy which we have considered have at least one thing in common. They all assume that God is the cause of our suffering, and they try to understand why God would want us to suffer. Is it for our own good, or is it a punishment we deserve, or could it be that God does not care what happens to us? Many of the answers were sensitive and imaginative, but none was totally satisfying. Some let us to blame ourselves in order to spare God's reputation. Others asked us to deny reality or to repress our true feeling. We were left either hating ourselves for deserving such a fate, or hating God for sending it to us when we did not deserve it.
There may be another approach. Maybe God does not cause our suffering. Maybe it happens for some reason other than the will of God.
page 29, paragraphs 2&3, lines 1-3
In an effort to comfort Job, whose children have died and who is suffering from the boils, the three friends say all the traditional, pious things. In essence, they preach the point of view contained in the original Job-fable: Don't lose faith, despite these calamities. We have a loving Father in Heaven, and He will see to it that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.
Job, who has probably spoken these same words innumerable times to other mourners, realizes for the first time how hollow and offensive they are. What do you mean, He will see to it that the good prosper and the wicked are punished?! Are you implying that my children were wicked and that is why they died? Are you saying that I am wicked, and that is why all this is happening to me? Where was I so terrible? What did I do that was so much worse than anything you did, that I should suffer so much worse a fate?
page 34, paragraphs 1&2
...God may choose to be fair and give a person what he deserves, punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous. But can we say logically that an all-powerful God must be fair? Would He still be all-powerful if we, by living virtuous lives, could compel Him to protect and reward us? Or would He then be reduced to a kind of cosmic vending machine, into which we insert the right number of tokens and from which we get what we want (with
the option of kicking and cursing the machine if it doesn't give us what we paid for)?
page 40, paragraph 3, lines 1-10
How does Job understand his misery? He says, we live in an unjust world, from which we cannot expect fairness. There is a God, but He is free of the limitations of justice and righteousness.
page 41, paragraph 3
Bad things do happen to good people in this world, but it is not God who wills it.
page 42, paragraph 2, lines 4-6
Innocent people do suffer misfortunes in this life. Things happen to them far worse than they deserve--they lose their jobs, they get sick, their children suffer or make them suffer. But when it happens, it does not represent God punishing them for something they did wrong. The misfortunes do not come from God at all.
page 44, paragraph 1
If God is a God of justice and not of power, then He can still be on our side when bad things happen to us. He can know that we are good and honest people who deserve better. Our misfortunes are none of His doing, and so we can turn to Him for help. Our question will not be Job's question "God, why are You doing this to me?" but rather "God, see what is happening to me. Can You help me?" We will turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened and comforted.
page 44, paragraph 2, lines 2-11
...turn to God for things He can do to help us, instead of holding on to unrealistic expectations of Him which will never come about. The Bible, after all, repeatedly speaks of God as the special protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, without raising the question of how it happened that they became poor, widowed, or orphaned in the first place.
page 45, paragraph 2, lines 1-7
We can be angry at what has happened to us, without feeling that we are angry at God.
page 45, paragraph 3, lines 3&4
Can you accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe? Some people cannot handle that idea. They look for connections, striving desperately to make sense of that happens. They convince themselves that God is cruel, or that they are sinners, rather than accept randomness. Sometimes, when they have made sense of ninety percent of everything they know, they let themselves assume that the other ten percent makes sense also, but lies beyond the reach of their understanding. But why do we have to insist on everything being
reasonable? Why must everything happen for a specific reason? Why can't we let the universe have a few rough edges?
page 46, paragraph 2, lines 2-14
The story is told of the youngster who came home from Sunday School, having been taught the biblical story of the crossing of the Red Sea. His mother asked him what he had learned in class, and he told her: "The Israelites got out of Egypt, but Pharaoh and his army chased after them. They got to the Red Sea and they couldn't cross it. The Egyptian army was getting closer. So Moses got on his walkie-talkie, the Israeli air force bombed the Egyptians, and the Israeli navy built a pontoon bridge so the people could cross." The mother was shocked, "Is that the way they taught you the story?" "Well, no," the boy admitted, "but if I told it to you the way they told it to us, you'd never believe it."
page 56, paragraph 1
...we find proof of God precisely in the fact that laws of nature do not change. God had given us a wonderful, precise, orderly world. One of the things that makes the world livable is the fact that the laws of nature precise and reliable, and always work the same way. There is gravity: heavy objects always fall toward the earth, so a builder can build a house without having his materials float away. There is chemistry: mixing certain elements in certain proportions always yields the same result, so a doctor can prescribe medication and know what will happen. We can predict when the sun will rise and set on any given day. We can even predict when the moon will block the sun for certain areas, causing an eclipse. To the ancients, an eclipse was an unnatural event which they interpreted as God's way of warning them. To us, it is a perfectly natural event, a reminder of how precise a universe God has given us.
Our human bodies are miracles, not because they defy laws of nature, but precisely because they obey them. Our digestive systems extract nutrients from food. Our skins help to regulate body temperature by perspiring. The pupils of our eyes expand and contract in response to light. Even when we get sick, our bodies have built-in defense mechanisms to fight the illness. All these wonderful things happen, usually without our being aware of them, in accordance with the most precise laws of nature. That, not the legendary splitting of the Red Sea, in the real miracle.
But the understanding character of these laws, which makes medicine and astronomy possible, also causes problems. Gravity makes objects fall. Sometimes they fall on people and hurt them.
Sometimes gravity makes people slip on ice or sink under water. We could not live without gravity, but that means we have to live with the dangers it causes.
Laws of nature treat everyone alike. They do not make exceptions for good people or for useful people. If a man enters a house where someone has a contagious disease, he runs the risk of catching that disease. It makes no difference why he is in the house. He may be a doctor or a burglar; disease germs cannot tell the difference. If Lee Harvey Oswald fires a bullet at President John Kennedy, laws of nature take over from the moment that bullet is fired. Neither the course of the bullet nor the seriousness of the wound will be affected by questions of whether or not President Kennedy was a good person, or whether the world would be better off with him alive or dead.
Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. A bullet has not conscience; neither does a malignant tumor or an automobile gone out of control. That is why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone. On matter what stories we were taught about Daniel or Jonah in Sunday School, God does not reach down to interrupt the workings of laws of nature to protect the righteous from harm. This is a second area of our world which causes bad things to happen to good people, and God does not cause it and cannot stop it.
And really, how could we live in this world if He did? Let us suppose, for purposes of argument, that God was determined not to let anything bad happen to a good and pious person. If an Oswald shoots at the president, no matter how carefully he aims, God will make the bullet miss. If a wing falls off Air Force One, God will make it land safely. Would this be a better world, if certain people were immune to laws of nature because God favored them, while the rest of us had to fend for ourselves?
Let us suppose, again for purposes of argument, that I was one of those righteous people to whom God would not let anything bad happen, because I was an observant, charitable person with a young family, spending my life helping people. What would that mean? Would I be able to go out in my shirtsleeves in cold weather and not get sick, because God would prevent the workings of nature from doing me harm? Could I cross streets against the lights in the face of heavy traffic, and not be injured? Could I jump out of high windows when I was in too much of a hurry to wait for an elevator, and not hurt myself? A world in which good people suffer from the same natural dangers that others do cause problems. But a world in which good people were immune to those laws would cause even more problems.
Insurance companies refer to earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters as "acts of God." I consider that a case of using God's name in vain. I don't believe that an earthquake that kills thousands of innocent victims without reason is an act of God. It is an act of nature. Nature is morally blind, without values. It churns along, following its own laws, not caring who or what gets in the way. But God is not morally blind. I could not worship Him if I thought He was. God stands for justice, for fairness, for compassion. For me, the earthquake is not an "act of God." The act of God is the courage of people to rebuild their lives after the earthquake, and the rush of others to help them in whatever way they can.
If a bride collapses, if a damn breaks, if a wing falls off and airplane and people die, I cannot see that as God's doing. I cannot believe that God wanted all those people to die at that moment, or that He wanted some of them to die and had no choice but to condemn the others along with them. I believe that these calamities are all acts of nature, and that there is no moral
reason for those particular victims to be singled our for punishment.
page 57, paragraph 1, lines 3-18, paragraph 2, pages 58-60, paragraph 1, lines 1-8
I cannot believe that God "sends" illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don't believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best. "What did I do to deserve this?" is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is "if this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?"
page 60, paragraph 2, lines 3-12
...pain is nature's way of telling us that we are overexerting ourselves, that some part of our body is not functioning as it was meant to, or is being asked to do more than it was intended to.
page 62, paragraph 1, lines 4-7
We feel pain as a signal that something is wrong in that marvelously intricate machine, our body.
page 62, paragraph 2, lines 3-5
...our question will change from, "why do we have to feel pain?" to "what do we do with our pain so that it becomes meaningful and not just pointless empty suffering? How can we turn all the painful experiences of our lives into birth pangs or into growing pains?" We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have a lot to say about what the suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it.
page 64, paragraph 1, lines 3-11
This is what it means to be human "in the image of God." It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instincts would tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.
page 79, paragraph 1, lines 1-5
In order to let us be free, in order to let us be human, God has to leave us free to choose to do right or to do wrong. If we are not free to choose evil, then we are not free to choose good either.
page 80, paragraph 1, lines 1-4
Our moral freedom means that, if we choose to be selfish or dishonest, we can be selfish and dishonest, and God will not stop us. If we want to take something that does not belong to us, God will not reach down and pull our hand away for the cookie jar. If we want to hurt someone, God will not intervene to keep us from doing it. All He will do is tell us that certain things are wrong, warn us that we will be sorry for having done them, and hope that, if we don't take His word for it, we will at least from experience.
page 80, paragraph 3
Why, then, do bad things happen to good people? One reason is that our being human leaves us free to hurt each other, and God can't stop us without taking away the freedom that makes us human. Human beings can cheat each other, rob each other, hurt each other, and God can only look down in pity and compassion at how little we have learned over the ages about how human beings should behave. This line of reasoning helps me understand that monstrous eruption of evil we speak of as the Holocaust, the death of millions of innocent people at the hands of Adolf Hitler. When people ask, "Where was God in Auschwitz? How could He have permitted the Nazis to kill so many innocent men, women, and children?", my response is that it was not God who caused it. It was caused by human beings choosing to be cruel to their fellow men.
page 81, paragraph 2, lines 1-15
To try to explain the Holocaust, or any suffering, as God's will is to side with the executioner rather than with his victim, and to claim that God does the same.
page 82, paragraph 1
...human beings are free to choose the direction their life will take. Granted, some children are born with physical or mental capacities which limit their freedom of choice. Not everyone can choose to be an opera singer, surgeon, or a professional athlete. Granted further that some parents mishandle their children badly, that accidental events--wars, illnesses--traumatize children so badly that they may not be able to do something they would otherwise be qualified for, and that some people are so addicted to habits that it is hard to speak of them as being free. But I will insist that every adult, no matter how unfortunate a childhood he had or how habit-ridden he may be, is free to make choices about his life. If we are not free, if we are bound by circumstances and experiences, then we are no different from the animal who is bound by instinct. To say of Hilter, to say of any criminal, that he did not choose to be bad but was aa victim of his upbringing, is to make all morality, all discussion of right and wrong, impossible. It leaves unanswered the question of why people in similar circumstances did not become Hilters. But worse, to say "it is not his fault, he was not free to choose" is to rob a person of him humanity, and reduce him to the level of an animal who is similarly not free to choose between right and wrong.
page 83, paragraph 1, lines 12-34
That's what we're here on earth for, to be in God's service, to do God's bidding.
page 85, paragraph 2, lines 16&17
GOD HELPS THOSE WHO STOP HURTING THEMSELVES
page 87, chapter title
One of the worst things that happens to a person who has been hurt by life is that he tends to compound the damage by hurting himself a second time. Not only is he the victim of rejection, bereavement, injury, or bad luck; he often feels the need to see himself as a bad person who had this coming to him, and because of that drives away people who try to come close to him and help him. Too often, in our pain and confusion, we instinctively do the wrong thing. We don't feel we deserve to be helped, so we let guilt, anger, jealousy, and self-imposed loneliness make a bad situation even worse.
page 87, paragraph 1
It is hard to know what to say to a person who has been struck by tragedy, but it is easier to know what not to say. Anything critical of the mourner (don't take it so hard," "try to hold back your tears, you're upsetting people") is wrong. Anything which tries to minimize the mourner's pain (it's probably for the best," "it could be a lot worse," "she's better off now") is likely to be misguided and unappreciated. Anything which asks the mourner to disguise or reject his feelings ("we have no right to question God," "God must love you to have selected you for this burden") is wrong as well.
page 88, paragraph 3, lines 6-16
The phrase "Job's comforters" has come into the language to describe people who mean to help, but who are more concerned with their own needs and feelings than they are with those of the other person, and so end up only making things worse.
Job's friends did do at least two things right, through. First of all, they came. ... It is not pleasant to see a friend suffering, and most of us would rather avoid the experience. We either stay away entirely, so that the suffering person experiences isolation and a sense of rejection on top of his tragedy, or we come and try to avoid the reason for our being there. ...
And secondly, they listened.
page 89, paragraph 3, lines 7-11 & page 90, paragraph 1, lines
1,2,5-9 & paragraph 2, line 1
When things don't turn out as we would like them to, it is very tempting to assume that had we done things differently, the story would have had a happier ending. Clergymen know that any time there is a death, the survivors will feel guilty. Because the course of action they took turned out badly, they believe that the opposite course--keeping Mother at home, deferring the operation--would have turned better. After all, how could it have turned out any worse? Survivors feel guilty for still being alive while a loved one is dead. They feel guilty when they think of all the kind words they never got around to saying to the deceased, and the good things they never found time to do for her.
page 91, paragraph 3, lines 1-12
How many public and personal superstitions are based on something good or bad having happened right after we did
something, and our assuming that the same thing will follow the same pattern every time?
page 92, paragraph 1, lines 11-14
To try to make a child feel better by telling him how beautiful it is in heaven and how happy his father is to be with God is another way of depriving him of the chance to grieve. When we do that, we ask a child to deny and mistrust his own feelings, to be happy when he really wants to be sad even as all of us around him are sad.
page 98, paragraph 1
As I entered the family's home after a burial, I heard an aunt say the boy, "Don't fee bad, Barry. God took your mother because He needed her now more then you did." I give the aunt the benefit of the doubt: surely she was trying to make Barry feel better. She was trying to make sense of a horrible and tragic event. But it seems to me that she did at least three things seriously wrong in those two sentences.
First of all, she told Barry not to fee bad. Yet why shouldn't he feel bad on the day of his mother's funeral? Why shouldn't he be entitled to honest feelings of pain, anger, loss? Why should be have to censor his honest, legitimate feelings in order to make the day easier for other people?
Second, she explained his mother's death in terms of God "taking her away." I don't believe that. It doesn't fit my understanding of God and less open to the comforting ministrations of religion.
But most seriously of all, she suggested that God had taken Barry's mother "because He needed her now more than you did." I think I understand what she was trying to say. She wanted to say that her sister-in-law's death was not meaningless, that it served some purpose in God's scheme of things. But I suspect that was not the message that Barry got. What Barry heard was, "It's your fault that your mother died. You didn't need her enough. If you had needed her more, she would still be alive."
page 102, paragraph 2, lines 3-10 & page 103, paragraphs 1&2
...being angry at God won't hurt God, and neither will it provide Him to take measures against us. If it makes us feel better to vent our anger at Him over a painful situation, we are free to do it. The only thing wrong with doing it is that what happened to us was not really God's fault.
What we do with our anger when we have been hurt? The goal, if we can achieve it, would be to be angry at the situation, rather than at ourselves, or at those who might have prevented it or are close to us trying to help us, or at God who let it happen. Getting angry at ourselves makes us depressed. Being angry at other people scares them away and makes it harder for them to help us. Being angry at God erects a barrier between us and all the sustaining, comforting resources of religion that are there to help us at such times. But being angry at the situation, recognizing it as something rotten, unfair, and totally undeserved, shouting about it, denouncing it, crying over it, permits us to discharge the anger which is a part of being hurt, without making it harder for us to be helped.
page 108, paragraph 2, lines 1-5 & paragraph 3
There is an Old Chinese tale about the woman whose only son died. In her grief, she went to the holy man and said, "What prayers, what magical incantations do you have to bring my son back to life?" Instead of sending her away or reasoning with her, he said to her, "Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to drive the sorrow out of your life." The woman set off at once in search of that magical mustard seed. She came first to a splendid mansion, knocked at the door, and said, "I am looking for a home that has never known sorrow. Is this such a place? It is very important to me." They told her, "You've certainly come to the wrong place," and began to describe all the tragic things that had recently befallen them. The woman said to herself, "Who is better able to help these poor unfortunate people than I, who have had misfortune of my own?" She stayed to comfort them then went on in her search for a home that had never known sorrow. But wherever she turned, in hovels and in places, she found one tale after another of sadness and misfortune. Ultimately, she became so involved in ministering to other people's grief that she forgot about her quest for the magical seed, never realizing that it has in fact driven the sorrow out of her life.
page 110, paragraph 2
Praying for a person's health, for a favorable outcome of an operation, has implications that ought to disturb a thoughtful person. If prayer worked the way many people think it does, no one would ever die, because no prayer is ever offered more sincerely than the prayer for life, for health and recovery from illness, for ourselves and for those we love.
If we believe in God, but we do not hold God responsible for life's tragedies, if we believe that God wants justice and fairness but cannot always arrange for them, what are we doing when we pray to God for a favorable outcome to a crisis in our life?
Do I--and does the man who called me--really believe in a God who has the power to cure malignancies and influence the outcome of surgery, and will do that only if the right person recites the right words in the right language? And will God let a person die because a stranger, praying on her behalf, got some of the words wrong? Who among us could respect or worship a God whose implicit message was "I could have made your mother healthy again, but you didn't plead and grovel enough"?
And if we don't get what we prayed for, how do we keep from being either angry with God, or feeling that we have been judged and found wanting? How do we avoid feeling that God has let us down just when we needed Him most? And how do we avoid the equally undesirable alternative of feeling that God has disapproved of us? Imagine the mind and heart of a blind or crippled child who has been raise on pious stories with happy endings, stories of people who prayed and were miraculously cured. Imagine that child praying with all the sincerity and innocence he can muster, that God make him whole, like other children. And now imagine his grief, his anger turned outward at God and at those who told him those stories, or turned on himself, when he realizes that his handicap is going to be permanent. What better way to teach children to hate God than to teach them that God could have cured them, but "for their own good" choose not to?
There are several ways in which we can answer the person who asks, "Why didn't I get what I prayed for?" And most of the answers are problematic, leading to feelings of guilt, or anger, or hopelessness.
--You didn't get what you prayed for, because you didn't deserve it.
__You didn't get what you prayed for, because you didn't pray hard enough.
__You didn't get what you prayed for, because God knows what is best for you better than you do.
__You didn't get what you prayed for, because someone else's prayer for the opposite result was more worthy.
__You didn't get what you prayed for, because prayer is a sham; God doesn't hear prayers.
__You didn't get what you prayed for because there is not God.
If we are not satisfied with any of these answers, but don't want to give up on the idea of prayer, there is one other possibility. We can change our understanding of what it means to pray, and what it means for our prayers to be answered.
The Talmud, the compilation of discussions of Jewish Law which I have quote earlier in this book, gives examples of bad prayers, improper prayers, which one should not utter. If a woman is pregnant, neither she nor her husband should pray, "May God grant this child be a boy" (nor, for that matte, may they pray that it is a girl). The sex of the child is determined at conception, and, God cannot be invoked to change it. Again, if a man sees a fire engine racing toward his neighborhood, he should not pray, "Please God, don't let the fire be my house." Not only is it mean-spirited to pray that someone's house burn instead of yours, but it is futile. A certain house is already on fire; the most sincere or articulate of prayers will not affect the question of which house it is.
We can extend this logic to contemporary situations. It would be equally improper for a high school senior, holding a letter from a college admissions office, to pray, "Please God, let it be an acceptance," or for a person waiting for the report of a biopsy to pray, "please God, let everything be all right." As with the Talmudic cases of the pregnant woman and the burning house, certain conditions already exist. We cannot ask God to go back and rewrite the past.
Neither, as we have suggested already, can we ask God to change laws of nature for our benefit, to make fatal conditions less fatal or to change the inexorable course of an illness. Sometimes miracles do happen. Malignancies mysteriously disappear; incurable patients recover, and baffled doctors credit it to an act of God.d All we can do in a case like that is echo the doctor's bewildered gratitude. We don't know why some people spontaneously recover from illnesses which kill or cripple others. We don't know why some people die in car crashes or plane crashes, while other people, sitting right next to them, walk away with a few cuts and bruises and a bad scare. I can't believe that God chooses to hear the prayers of some and not of others. There would be no discernible rhyme or reason to His doing that. No amount of research into the lives of those who died and those who survived would help us learn how to live or how to pray so that we too would win God's favor.
When miracles occur, and people beat the odds against their survival, we would be well advised to bow our heads in thanks at the presence of a miracle, and not think that our prayers, contributions or abstentions are what did it. The next time we try, we may wonder why our prayers are ineffective.
Another category of prayer not fit for praying would be prayers meant to do someone else harm.
page 113, paragraph 2 & pages 114-117, paragraphs 1&2, lines 1&2
...we cannot ask God in prayer to do something which is within our power, so as to spare us the choice of doing it. A contemporary theologian has written these words:
We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end war;
For we know that You have made the world in a way
That man must find his own path to peace
Within himself and with his neighbor.
We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end starvation;
For you have already given us the resource
With which to feed the entire world
If we would only use them wisely.
We cannot merely pray to You, O God,
To root out prejudice,
For You have already given us eyes
With which to see the good in all men
If we would only use them rightly.
We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end despair,
For You have already given us the power
To clear away slums and to give hope
If we would only use our power justly.
We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end disease,
For you have already given us great minds with which
To search out cures and healing,
If we would only use them constructively.
Therefore we pray to You instead, O God,
For strength, determination, and willpower,
To do instead of just to pray,
To become instead of merely to wish.
page 117, paragraph 3, lines 1-28
...the primary purpose of religion at its earliest level was not to put people in touch with God, but to put them in touch with one another. Religious rituals taught people how to share with their neighbors the experiences of birth and bereavement, of children marrying and parents dying. There were rituals for planting and for harvesting, for the winter solstice and for the vernal equinox. In that way, the community would be able to share
the most joyous and the most frightening moments of life. No one would to face them alone.
page 119, paragraph 1, lines 13-22
We need to share our joys with other people, and we need even more to share our fears and our grief.
page 119, paragraph 2, lines 6-8
...prayer puts us in touch with God. I am not sure prayer puts us in touch with God the way many people think it does--that we approach God as a supplicant, a beggar asking for favors, or as a customer presenting Him with a shopping list and asking what it will cost. Prayer is not primary a matter of asking God to change things. If we can come to understand what prayer can and should be, and rid ourselves of some unrealistic expectations, we will be better able to call on prayer, and on God, when we need them most.
page 122, paragraph 2, lines 3-12
God's blessings are not for sale.
page 122, paragraph 4, lines 26&27
..."God, I have no claims on You and nothing to offer You. You have already given me more than I had any right to expect. There is only one reason for my turning to You now--because I need You. I am scared; I have to face up to something hard tomorrow, and I am not sure I can do it alone, without You.
page 124, paragraph 1, lines 6-11
...the kind of prayer that God answers. We can't pray that He make our lives free of problems; this won't happen, and it is probably just as well. We can't ask Him to make us and those we love immune to disease, because He can't do that. We can't ask Him to weave a magic spell around us so that bad things will only happen to other people, and never to us. People who pray for miracles usually don't get miracles, any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or boyfriends get them as a result of praying. But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the bearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayers answered. They discover that they have more strength, more courage than they ever knew themselves to have. Where did they get it? I would like to think that their prayers helped them find that strength. Their prayers helped them tap hidden reserves of faith and courage which were not available to them before.
page 125, paragraph 1, lines 1-17
The God I believe in does not send us the problem; He gives us the strength to cope with the problem.
Where do you get the strength to go on, when you have used up all of your own strength? Where do you turn for patience when you have run out of patience, when you have been more patient for more years than anyone should be asked to be, and the end is nowhere in sight? I belief that God gives us strength and patience and hope, renewing our spiritual resources when they run dry. How else do
sick people manage to find more strength and more good humor over the course of prolonged illness than any one person could possibly have, unless God was constantly replenishing their souls? How else to widows find the courage to pick up the pieces of their lives and go out to face the world alone, when on the day of their husband's funeral, they did not have that courage? How else to the parents of a retarded or brain-damaged youngster wake up every morning and turn again to their responsibilities, unless they are able to lean on God when they grow weak?
We don't have to beg or bribe God to give us strength or hope or patience. We need only turn to Him, admit that we can't do this on our own, and understand that bravely bearing up under long-term illness is one of the most human, and one of the most godly, things we can ever do. One of the things that constantly reassures me that God is real, and not just an idea that religious leaders made up, is the fact that people who pray for strength, hope, and courage so often find resources of strength, hope, and courage that they did not have before they prayed.
page 127, paragraph 3, lines 4-6, paragraph 4 & page 128, paragraph 1
"If God can't make my sickness go away, what good is He? Who need Him?" God does not want you to be sick or crippled. He didn't make you gave this problem, and He doesn't want you to go on having it, but He can't make it go away. That is something which is to hard even for God. What good is He, then? God makes people become doctors and nurses to try to make you feel better. God helps us be brave even when we're sick and frightened, and He reassures us that we don't have to face our fears and our pains alone.
The conventional explanation, that God sends us the burden because He knows that we are strong enough to handle it, has it all wrong. Fate, not God, sends us the problem. When we try to deal with it, we find out that we are not strong. We are weak; we get tired, we get angry, overwhelmed. We begin to wonder how we will ever make it through all the years. But when we reach the limits of our own strength and courage, something unexpected happens. We find reinforcement coming from a source outside of ourselves. And in the knowledge that we are not alone, that God is on our side, we manage to go on.
page 129, paragraphs 1&2
In your desperation, you opened your heart in prayer, and what happened? You didn't get a miracle to avert a tragedy. But you discovered people around you, and God beside you, and strength within you to help you survive the tragedy. I offer that as an example of a prayer being answered.
page 130, paragraph 2, lines 12-17
I recognize His limitations. He is limited in what He can do by laws of nature and by the evolution of human nature and human moral freedom. I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents, and natural disasters, because I realize that I gain little and I lose so much when I blame God for those things. I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason.
page 134, paragraph 1, lines 3-11
God does not cause our misfortunes. Some are caused by bad luck, some are caused by bad people, and some are simply an inevitable consequence of our being human and being mortal, living in a world of inflexible natural laws.
page 134, paragraph 2, lines 1-4
...the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us. They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. But we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning of them. The question we should be asking is not, "Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?" That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be "Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?"
page 136, paragraph 1, lines 1-10
Life, he concluded, has to be lived for something, not just against something.
We too need to get over the questions that focus on the past and on the pain--"why did this happen to me?"--and ask instead the question which opens doors to the future: "Now that this has happened, what shall I do about it?"
page 136, paragraph 2, lines 18&19 & page 137, paragraph 1
...Suffering, suggests that "the most important question we can ask about suffering is whom it serves. Does our suffering serve God or the devil, the cause of becoming alive or being morally paralyzed?" Not "where does the tragedy come from?" but "where does it lead?" is the issue on which Soelle would have us focus.
page 137, paragraph 1, lines 5-10
If the death of an elderly woman in Auschwitz or of a child in a hospital ward leaves us doubting God and less able to affirm the world's goodness, then that woman and that child become "the devil's martyrs," witnesses against God, against the meaningfulness of a moral life, rather than witnesses favor. But (and this is Soelle's most important point) it is not the circumstances of their death that makes witnesses for or against God. It is our reaction to their death.
The facts of life and death are neutral. We, by our responses, give suffering either a positive or a negative meaning. Illnesses, accidents, human tragedies kill people. But they do not necessary kill life or faith. If the death and suffering of someone we love makes us bitter, jealous, against all religion, and incapable of happiness, we turn the person who died into one of the "devil's martyrs." If suffering and death in someone close to us bring us to explore the limits of our capacity for strength and love and cheerfulness, if it leads us to discover sources of consolation we never knew before, then we make the person into a witness for affirmation of life rather than its rejection.
page 137, paragraph 3, lines 3-11 & page 138, paragraph 1
If God does not cause the bad things that happen to good people, and if He cannot prevent them, what good is He at all?
First of all, God has created a world in which many more good things than bad things happen. We find life's disasters upsetting not only because they are painful but because they are exceptional. Most people wake up on most days feeling good. Most illnesses are curable. Most airplanes take off and land safety. Most of the time, when we send our children out to play, they come home safely. The accident, the robbery, the inoperable tumor are life-shattering exceptions, but they are very rare exceptions. When you have been hurt by life, it may be hard to keep that in mind. When you are standing very close to a large object, all you can see is the object. Only by stepping back from it can you also see the rest of its setting around it. When we are stunned by some tragedy, we can only see and feel the tragedy. Only with time and distance can we see the tragedy in the context of a whole life and a whole world.
page 138, paragraph 3, lines 2-4 & paragraph 4, lines 1-16
How does God make a difference in our lives if He neither kills or cures? God inspires people to help other people who have been hurt by life, and by helping them, they protect them from the danger of feeling alone, abandoned, or judged. God makes some people want to become doctors and nurses, to spend days and nights of self-sacrificing concern with an intensity for which no money can compensate, in the effort to sustain life and alleviate pain. God moves people to want to be medical researchers, to focus their intelligence and energy on the causes and possible cures for some of life's tragedies.
page 139, paragraph 1, lines 1-10
God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help.
page 140, paragraph 1, lines 1&2
God shows His opposition to cancer and birth defects, not by eliminating them or making them happen only to bad people (He can't do that), but by summoning forth friends and neighbors to ease the burden and to fill the emptiness.
page 140, paragraph 1, lines 3-7
...to the person who asks "what good is God? Who needs religion, if these things happen to good people and bad people alike?" I would say that God may not prevent the calamity, but He gives us the strength and the perseverance to overcome it.
page 141, paragraph 2, lines 1-5
The flood that devastates a town is not an "act of God," even if the insurance companies find it useful to call it that. But the efforts people make to save lives, risking their own lives for a person who might be a total stranger to them and the determination to rebuild their community after the flood waters have receded, do qualify as acts of God.
When a person is dying of cancer, I do not hold God responsible for the cancer of for the pain he feels. They have other causes. But I have seen God give such people the strength to take each day as it comes, to be grateful for a day full of sunshine or one in which they are relatively free of pain.
When people who were never particularly strong become strong the face of adversity, when people who tended to think only of themselves become unselfish and heroic in an emergency, I have to ask myself where they got these qualities which they would freely admit they did not have before. My answer is that this is one of the ways in which God helps us when we suffer beyond the limits of our own strength.
page 141, paragraph 3 & page 142, paragraphs 1&2
"Man depends son God for all things; God depends on man for
one. Without Man's love, God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is one thing no one, not even God Himself, can command. It is a free gift, or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spirit of suffering, of injustice, and of death." We do not love God because He is perfect. We do not love Him because He protect us from all harm and keeps evil things from happening to us. We do not love Him because we are afraid of Him, or because He will hurt us if we turn our back on Him. We love Him because He is God, because He is the author of all the beauty and the order around us, the source of our strength and the hope and courage within us, and of other people's strength and hope and courage with which we are helped in our time of need. We love Him because He is the best part of ourselves and of our world. That is what it means to love. Love is not the admiration of perfection, but the acceptance of an imperfect person with all his imperfections, because loving and accepting him makes us better and stronger.
page 146, paragraph 2, lines 3-22