I think my headphones are becoming melded to my body, making me literally an Elon-Era Cyborg, or whatever it is when you do some technological engineering to “improve” the human body instead of just letting it be what it “naturally” is.
I keep thinking that, in a few minutes, I’ll be able to stop listening to live-streamed Twitter spaces, but then I worry I will miss some important news. What would happen if I didn’t know what was happening as it happens? Like, would I even be able to change the course of my life or make some kind of important decision if I weren’t able to know what is going on thousands of miles away? The result of this all-news diet is that everything, as I said to a friend yesterday, feels like it’s on fire. My house is a flame of disorder. My email inbox is a conflagration. My phone is buzzing and screaming at me. My children have a legion of important and complicated troubles they wish to discuss—at length. Many people I know and love are dealing with murky and painful health troubles. Others feel overcome by discouragement and sorrow. And that’s all before breakfast. As the day wears on the reports of bad things will keep coming in, and there will be a mountain of opportunities for despair and anxiety.
Narrowing the scope of trouble, which may or may not be a useful thing to do, one finds two large stones in the middle of the path that are always there, but when lots of things go wrong at once, it becomes very hard to go around them, or over them, or lift them out of the way. The first stone of stumbling, a great rock of offense, is the question of whether or not God is good. You can pretend a lot of ways around having to answer this question. You can say that God doesn’t exist, for example, or you can say that he is something other than he is—like not omniscient, or not omnipotent, or capricious, or something like that. You can jettison any number of the paradoxical pearls that have to be threaded together on the string of true belief—like the Trinity, or Jesus being both God and Man, or justice embracing mercy. You can twist it around and lie and say that only some people are bad which, in its own way, circumscribes the goodness of God. You can even say that all religious paths are headed up the same mountain and will eventually converge on the seat of that eutopic cosmic feeling of warmth and goodwill that is all one requires to step over the threshold of death and into the eternal Whatever. But at the end of the day, if you finally face who God is as he is, and want to accept that he is good, you’re going to have to bite down and see what happens. You’re going to have to stop and sit on the rock and trust in your soul and body that it isn’t actually a pit, or Sheol, or utter ruin.
The second rock to stub your toe on is whether or not the Church is something a good God would love. If God is who he is, and also good, and he brought forth the Church according to his good, perfect, and loving will, people who accept God are going to, one way or another, accept his Church. The trouble is, some of the most notorious people who are unwilling to accept the church—according to the dictates and precepts of the God who made her—are the ones who sit on her earthly thrones, or perch on her stools during the sermon time, coffee in hand—the ones who are supposed to be leading and guiding all the sheep who otherwise perish looking for water and food. Those outside of the church hate her, and, for some appalling reason, those leading her also seem to hate her, at least in these latter apostasy-addled days.
This post is brought to you by the war-torn Middle East, on one hand, for which there are too many links to find, and, on the other hand, the fact that the bishops of the Church of England, having been given ample opportunity to back off their ruinous course of gutting the doctrinal treasures of the faith, said, essentially, ‘meh, we feel like the Prayers for Love and Faith are great and accept them with no particular qualms because why wouldn’t we.’ Which is to say, tragically, that they don’t think that God is a serious or real contender, that what he says is either unknowable or doesn’t matter, and that there isn’t any point in even trying anymore. They, thus, trample underfoot all those who most need the mercy of a good and loving God who came to rescue them out of all their troubles.
I finally made it out of Psalm 119 in my efforts to get through the Bible in a short time by listening to at least 4 daily portions in only one and arrived upon the gorgeous and pathos-laden Songs of Ascents. I imagine that every believing person in that small scrap of land must be reciting, over and over,
I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.
Reciting it, indeed, as they are being struck, as the evil presses in and darkness falls. In this way, the unbelieving world looks at those clinging to their silent, certainly futile prayers, and smugly imagines that God must be very far off and that there will be no consequences for any of their wicked decisions and plans. But not those believers only. Even the basically comfortable and yet discouraged Christian in Europe, or America, or anywhere really, mumble it as they try to get through the bleak and isolating work of finding a place to worship God that hasn’t been corrupted and destroyed by false shepherds. Either way, this desperate prayer might feel futile, a useless striving after the wind. Why bother?
There is just one thing to remember, though. God is good. He is not the evil one. He has not abandoned those whom he calls to himself. He does not let your foot be moved, though your body fall into the grave and your mind begin to wander the shadowland of death. He will keep your life. He will not let you be lost in the roiling conflict of nations and theology. He is forevermore and has the power to save your soul and your body, either today or forever. Indeed, he is the rock you can sit on because his cross was stuck there, and he took all the death and ruin on himself. The sun went dark, the evil mounted like a flood, and he answered definitively and forever the question of his own goodness by covering you, by shielding you with his own Body.
And on that note, I must run away to church and do a lot of things that don’t seem like they will amount to much, except that they are in service to the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, whose steadfast love endures forever.
Amen. You show the way through the chaos and bewilderment - by meditating on the Word. I am so grateful that your contemplations draw the Christological content of the cross and empty tomb to fill up the Psalm, that you make explicit what the poet only saw vaguely. The narrative of Christ Jesus fills in the sketchy places and grants meaning to our suffering. His victory over sin, death, and the power of the darkness in His resurrection sounds the first trumpeting of the Parousia at which all will be made right. Thanks again, Anne. As Dame Julian etched into our ecclesiastical memory, All will be well. And all manner of things be well.
The problem of evil and the goodness of God has always been a tricky one for me, and I think that the juxtaposition of the American Christian community with my experiences in the Philippines, which I’m still unpacking all these years later, threw me into a bit of bitterness in my earlier years. I’m interested to see what digging into this again will bring.