Sitting With the Paradox Of God

In this post-modern era, we are uncomfortable with mystery. Not mystery novels - not the “whodunits’ and the solving of crimes; not the mysteries of whether there is life on another planet. Not even the “mysteries”of science and mathematics. Not those mysteries, the ones we can craft and use to entertain, or the ones we believe that we will be able to solve, given enough time, money, resources and sheer will and determination.

Not those; I mean the real mysteries. Those unanswerable questions - the deeper mysteries of life and universe we rarely sit with because they are just too hard to comprehend. Because we know that no amount of intelligence - human or otherwise - will ever be able to solve them. And many of us just won’t accept that. It’s uncomfortable. It’s hard. So we turn away - from the question, from trying to understand. And yes - from God.

Many of us grew up thinking that the world is good or bad; blessed or cursed; beautiful or ugly; a binary world that given enough time, we would be able to figure out if we simply had the right formula, the right college degree, the right philosophy, the right religion. It would all make sense if we followed the rules. That if we went to the right church, or temple, or synagogue or mosque as required, we would somehow make sense of this world, of the pain. That if we were “good”, God would protect, care for, provide for. If we were “good”, then we were safe.

A “good God” does that, right?

And when the world doesn’t seem to make sense, or when it seems that God doesn’t care - or it seems He doesn’t even exist, many walk away, feeling the betrayal of an unknown God who doesn’t deliver; whose ways and thoughts make no sense.

We have so many unanswered questions, and with those come sadness, anger, discontent; a void so deep we are unsure how to fill it. We struggle with so many whys:

Why so much suffering everywhere we look?

Why do some people seem to suffer unbearably while others go through life seemingly unscathed? Why do some women joyfully give birth to a house-full of laughing healthy children, and other women struggle year after year to produce just one living child? Why the seemingly incoherent randomness of destruction by flood, earthquake, hurricanes? Or the intentional travesties of wars and bombings and genocidal madmen? Why pandemics? Or cancer? Or the hundreds of chronic painful diseases that seem to randomly attack with no seeming rationality? Why hunger, starvation, deprivation? Why evil? Why injustice? Why, God? Why?

How do we reconcile the evil we see in this world, the pain and heartache, the unbearable losses of so many with the message from Sunday pulpits that God is good, and kind and loving, and that all will be well?

I have no answers. But I do know some things to be true.

I think that to believe that God is good in the face of all that is not good is to hold the paradox of these seemingly opposite realities in tension within - within our hearts - not our minds. Our minds want answers, but our hearts can live with paradox, with mystery.

I have learned that it is not necessary to understand the hows and whys of God in order to believe in His goodness, in His reality, in His supreme love for this world. The world will never make “sense” the way we want it to: the failings and foibles of human nature are as incomprehensible to me as the supreme acts of goodness and kindness and heroism that are in evidence all around us - if we but look.

I believe that truly understanding the paradox of good and evil within the context of the Divine will not happen in this lifetime - but that doesn’t invalidate a good God. It certainly is not proof that God doesn’t care, or doesn’t love - or doesn’t exist.

Instead, I think we need to learn to sit with the mystery of God: to allow God to be God as He will - and not as we want Him to be. We have to come to accept that we will never truly understand; that there truly is an unsolvable mystery. We cannot relegate God’s ways to our own; it’s not possible. We cannot seek to reduce Him to our minds - no matter how intelligent. Many world religions have recognized this for thousands of years, but modern man struggles so; we want to make sense of it all. But we simply can’t. St Augustine said it best: “If you understand it, it is not God.” In this 21st century, that seems the height of paradox, of mystery. And paradox is not a comfort zone for modern man.

Ultimately, we come to know God and His goodness through His love, and that is because we choose to believe it - not because He has to prove it. If we wait until we see the world turn “right side up” in order to give God the benefit of the doubt, we’ll never get there. The mystery, the paradox of all that we don’t understand needs to be be held in gentle tension within our hearts; the both/and of good and evil, of love given and received. Only then can we truly sit in the mystery of Who God really is. Only then can we fully enter into the paradox of God being God. No matter what.