BY JANE RZEPKA, SENIOR MINISTER,CHURCH OF THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP
I am sitting in a roomful of about forty Polish Catholics. We are in a funeral home, Sobocinski’s Funeral Home, “between,” as anybody from Detroit would say, “8 and 9 Mile.”
The occasion is sad, of course, as my husband’s father has died, and there he is, in his open casket, right there with us. But most of the people have been in the room for all twelve of the visiting hours, as seems to be their custom, “6-9 Wednesday and 12-9 Thursday,” and by this time somehow it is perfectly natural to sit around talking and laughing and remembering.
It’s a grand reunion. In the midst of the grieving I am sitting with the aunts and girl cousins; they are telling me that the butcher has begun to put a touch too many prunes in the kielbasa and it’s turning out too sweet; they are telling me that their grandchildren won’t eat duck blood soup unless they say the brownish soup is chocolate; they are telling me the rosary service is about to start.
I fail the rosary test. They know I’m not Catholic, and not even Polish— some of them boycotted our wedding on that account—but decades have gone by, some of their own children have gone on to marry even worse, and this time they want to make me feel welcome. So what do they say to me? We hear it all the time. They say, “Oh Jane, don’t worry. There’s only one God.”
Well I would have been delighted to get into a little theological discussion right there at Leo Sobocinski’s Funeral Home, but unaccustomed to the funeral customs as I was, even I was pretty sure that that discussion would be inappropriate at that particular location between 8 and 9 Mile, with that particular crowd.
You, on the other hand, are fair game.
In my opinion, human beings do not all believe in the same god. First, it goes without saying that large numbers of people, many among us, take the perfectly tenable position that no god exists at all. But among those who do believe in god, the gods vary dramatically.
One of the Bantu gods, Ndjambi, is an omnipresent, kind god, who sends rain and blessings upon the people, asking nothing in return. A contrasting god, a god on the Labrador Peninsula, the master of the caribou, spends his time watching to see if anybody comes within 150 miles of his home, and if they do, he kills them. A Columbian goddess is seen as the mother of all things—the thunder, the streams, the trees, the sun and the Milky Way. I am quite certain, had we been able to have the discussion, that the Polish aunts and uncles would agree that these are not the gods that were present at the rosary service at Sobocinski’s Funeral Home. We don’t all believe in the same god; of that I feel quite sure.
Even the god viewed by Christians and Jews differs in temperament, motivations, and strategies for getting human beings to behave. But during the Jewish High Holy Days, it’s worth noting that this god knows how to forgive, knows how to grant mercy. This god doesn’t always do it, but has that capacity.
Every year as Yom Kippur approaches, I find some way to preach about forgiveness. Quest readers were raised in all manner of religious and nonreligious households, and we’ve each come to view theology in our own ways. But I think we all care about forgiveness, and so over the years at this time of the year I’ve talked about forgiving ourselves, about forgiving one another, about letting ourselves be forgiven.
But this year I have another angle on forgiveness. This year, I want to talk about forgiving god—whichever of the gods might be yours, if you have one at all. Or forgiving the universe. Making peace with whatever it is that allows bad things to happen—even if it’s simply the random and natural way of the world. I want to talk about making peace with the fact that we are witness to atrocities, and that sometimes those atrocities happen to us. I want to talk about how it feels to be angry at god, whichever god that might be.
You may remember that Shakespeare’s King Lear, in Act III, having endured estrangement from his daughters, having been dispossessed and displaced and driven to distraction on his way to madness, stands in a storm on the heath and rails at the gods: “Blow, winds,and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanes, spout/ Till you have drenched our steeples, ..../ You sulphurous and thought executing fires,/ Vaunt-couriers to oak cleaving thunderbolts,/ Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,/ Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!/ Crack nature’s molds.... Let the great gods,/ That keep this dreadful [turmoil] o’er our heads,/ Find out their enemies now.” That’s the feeling I’m talking about. You are beyond the last straw. You didn’t deserve this, nobody does. You can’t take it anymore, it isn’t fair, and you are more than ready to blame whomever’s in charge. I’m not talking about reacting to the little day to day aspects of life that go wrong— you run out of milk, your good shoes get soaked in the rain, the ATM is out of order, the highway is backed way up. I’m referring to one tragedy heaped upon another tragedy until your spirit is all but broken.
In some religions, you can deliver a bowl of rice to your god and that god will go easy on the disasters for awhile. In some religions you can say some special words over and over again and your god will get to feeling friendly to you. In some religions you can kill a chicken or a goat and your god will reward you with good health, or riches, or rain when you need it. You may, yourself, believe in petitionary prayer, or that right living or proper attitude results in god’s favor, or that confession or sacrifice or promises will change the course of events. But no matter what our beliefs, whether we believe we can affect the powers that be or we believe in an indifferent universe altogether, we each have to reckon with the fact that no matter what we do, horrible things sometimes happen. It’s a profound and universal human experience.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Psalm 22, we read, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.... I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my mouth is dried up...and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.”
Likewise, later, in the Christian scriptures, Jesus gets into a terrible mess, the unthinkable crucifixion. Over the years of early Christianity, as the story of the crucifixion began to collect the details born of imagination, people speculated about what Jesus might have said as he hung on the cross. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark, though not the others, wound up pasting the beginning of Psalm 22 into the cruci-fixion story, and so we have Jesus expressing the same, very human sentiment as the psalmist: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
And don’t we know that feeling? God has abandoned us. Or maybe you would put it not in terms of god but this way: you believe that the cosmos operates according to a generally positive plan, but that plan seems suddenly to have gone haywire. Or maybe you put it down to karma, or past lives. Or maybe you believe that what is, just is, and the chips fall where they may. In any case, how will you cope with that feeling that whatever you had counted on or hoped for has let you down?
If you believe in a conventional god, you have two common choices (though of course there are others). You can say to yourself, “I believe in god, and god is good, but god isn’t really in control of everything.” Or you can say, “I believe in god, and god is in control of everything, but god has decided that, for whatever reason, we human beings are going to experience the full range of circumstance.” As Archibald MacLeish says in his play, J.B., “If God is God, He is not good./ If God is good, He is not God;/ Take the even, take the odd ...”
You may remember Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book, How Good Do We Have to Be? In this book, as well as in his other best seller, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Kushner takes the position that the bad things just aren’t god’s fault. That god loves us and wouldn’t be cruel.
On the Christian side, the distinguished theologian from several decades ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, winds up in a similar place. He says that god suffers with us. God is not all powerful.
Another way of solving the problem of why god lets bad things happen is to say that god is just god, creating life, directing the galaxies, doing god’s thing. Good and evil are merely human constructs; god knows nothing about them. You can even cite the Bible for this one if you want to: Jesus says, “God makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”
Those two solutions, the ones where you decide that either god is not all-powerful or god is not all-merciful, are very well for those of you who believe in a more or less conventional god, but the rest of us are left still wondering: How do human beings cope with utter tragedy?
I was recently reminded of an old story about three rabbis. The three rabbis put god on trial for allowing children to be murdered during the holocaust. The rabbis went into the temple and held the trial. They found god guilty for this most unspeakable of sins. After the trial, as they came out of the temple, one of the rabbis noticed it was almost sundown. He said to the others, “Look, it is time to pray.”
And the three rabbis knelt down in prayer.
There it is. That’s the answer—an answer worth thinking about for Yom Kippur. The answer to the question, “How do human beings cope whent heir gods or their universe or their world view has failed them?” That’s what people do in one form or another: they forgive god. They forgive. They come to terms with whatever’s in charge: the cosmos, happenstance, god. And then, wonder of wonders, they turn around and find something to praise. They—we—continue to pray or to sing or to note beauty with pleasure. We live on in spite of it all. We smile. We affirm. We find some positives out there.
Earlier, I quoted Psalm 22. But not all of Psalm 22. The writer, the lamenter, rails against god, but in fact he alternates between railing and praising. He complains, but then he goes on to tell god, “I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.... All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.”
That’s what two thirds of the Psalms do: they talk about the horrors of illness, famine, plague, siege, or exile, and then they talk about god’s majestic attributes, god’s power, and how thankful they feel.
Pretty weird, I know, but I think that’s what most of us do too, in one form or another. We whine, we put up a major fuss, and then we go out for ice cream. Life is unbearable, and my, didn’t that taste good.
I got a book catalogue in the mail the other day and I noticed a Thurber collection entitled, People Have More Fun than Anybody. That’s exactly the conclusion that the psalmist, and most of us, come to.
Really awful things happen in our world. Sometimes they happen to us. But still, somehow, we survive—we better than survive, we go on living, and with luck, we forgive whatever powers or circumstances that may be out there, and we get back in touch with the fact that people do have more fun than anybody.
We regain the ability to notice the incredible harvest moon. We laugh out loud at the stupidest line on late-night TV. The September sun feels warm on the top our head. The comfort of a friend is welcome. The turn of phrase in the library book, the melody of a song on the radio, strikes us just right. Our beds are warm and cozy. And before we know it, we are living lifeagain, singing praise, looking at a good day ahead. We don’t all believe in the same god—we may not believe in any god at all. But during these High Holy Days, we have forgiven whatever’s in charge.
