telling secrets
No sooner had I posted my clumsy comments on the problem of evil, than I stumbled on the passage below. Frederick Buechner writes better than anyone else I know. He’s also a much wiser man than I. And he has suffered. These comments come from a book of memoirs called “Telling Secrets”, just after he has been reflecting on the painful memories of his father’s suicide and his daughter’s battle with anorexia.
As I understand it, to say that God is mightily present even in such private events as these does not mean that he makes events happen to us which move us in certain directions like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is. For instance I cannot believe that a God of love and mercy in any sense willed my father’s suicide; it was my father himself who willed it as the only way out available to him from a life that for various reasons he had come to find unbearable…
As I see it, in other words, God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as the puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don’t, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small part in it.
Try reading that last sentence without taking a breath. God as the great director, not the puppeteer (or the script-writer) (or merely a character within the drama). Let me know what you think of Freddie’s thoughts.
zoomoterian says:
April 18th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Freddie the Presbie is getting very Calvinistic there. By which I mean he is taking his cues from Jean Calvin and not his tulip-bearing successors.
I hate when you do this Jaybercrow. I don’t like Beuchner. I have an irrational dislike of him and you start posting stuff like this and I have to go and change my mind.
I HATE CHANGING MY MIND!
Steve says:
April 20th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Fascinating. So, please excuse me if I’m being completely obvious, but I assume this is part of the same idea that you posted recently about the authority of the Bible? I’m making the connection anyhow – perhaps it’s the same author.
I love it. Is there the implication, though, that there is a limit to what God can do? So, we’re living in this fallen, messed up world, and God is among us, offering help to try to do things which will make it better. But does that restrict us?
Also, this is one model, based on Buechner’s experience. How can it be reconciled with those who live and breathe the miraculous? Perhaps, I’m over simplifying people’s experience, but I often find that there are fellow believers who preach and expect perfection and the miraculous in all things; the impression is given that God is more than just in the wings, but is moving and shaking nature according to His will. I don’t deny this power, but neither can I accept that it is as just asking God. Is there room in Buechner’s model for the miraculous? How does it fit in? Are there other elements to consider in asking this question?
Until tomorrow says:
April 26th, 2007 at 9:06 am
In relation to the last couple of posts: perhaps the really difficult question then is not how a good God can allow suffering, but why a sovereign God, who is in control (which I guess is something I’d want to maintain alongside the other two things which are ’simple and good and true’… if he’s not in control surely the question of ‘who wins’ really is as yet undecided), allows things to happen that are not part of his original good plan. It’s pretty amazing to think that we have an omnipotent God who is not a control freak and who yet loves to bring beauty and goodness out of the mess of allowing things not to happen his way. What would it look like for those of us who are leaders (or have power or influence in some way) to reflect that?
mark mck says:
May 13th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
By various ways my thoughts seem to keep being directed back to the problem of evil, suffering and the soverignity of God every now and then. They are by now way developed, but here goes…
Who is in control of this world? We like to say that God is, he made it, all things hold together by him, he is in control – that thought comforts us that is until something goes terribly wrong. At those times words and logic seem to fail us.
At a recent class on Bonhoffer my attention was drawn to a couple of verses which seem to suggest that God isn’t actually in control of this world – John 12:31; 1 John 5:19. They seem to be clearly saying God isn’t in control the devil is, which makes it a bit easier to explain bad things happening!
Do we need to grasp afresh the battle imagery in the bible, realising that this world and our lives are under the attack of the devil? And as is suggested by Buechner, God is along side us in this battle tending our wounds and acting as the great director (commander)?