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| Boat people in 1982 after eight days at sea. |
The Asian perspective on the universal puzzle of life's struggle might be provided by the story of the farmer who responds to the pain and distress with the query "Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?"
In a YouTube examination of human suffering, Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota taps into Catholic tradition to challenge us all to acknowledge that God's actions or permissions are beyond our capacity to understand because God is of an order than humans just cannot grasp.
Bishop Barron says:
I do a lot of debate and dialogue with non-believers. Very often when agnostics and atheists attack the faith, it’s along the lines of, “How could an all-knowing and all-good God allow"—now fill in the blank; maybe the suffering of children, or natural catastrophes, for animals to suffer the way they do, or leukemia in a five-year-old.
These are just so anomalous. “How could you possibly believe that an all-knowing, all-good God could allow these things?” Much of the objection hinges upon the puzzle that is proposed by the existence of God.
Here’s a classic answer from within the heart of our tradition. “I admit it,” Paul says, “I admit it. God’s ways are confounding to us.”
He says in Romans 11:33:
Oh, the depth of the riches
and the wisdom and the knowledge of God!
How inscrutable are his judgments
and how unsearchable his ways!
Barron continues:
So the atheist or the agnostic might say, “Well, isn’t that neat? Isn’t that an easy way out of the problem? To just say, ‘Oh, it’s a great mystery.’”
Well, not really. We have to realize whom we’re dealing with and whom we’re talking about when we deal with and talk about God. God is not something in the world.
[O]bjects and events and experiences within the world... If I use philosophical language, those are all categorical things. They can be categorized. I can say, “Oh yeah, that’s this type of thing and that’s something else. Oh yeah, that’s where that thing ends and where that thing begins.”
They are all definable, and limits to each can be identified.
I can say, “Well, yeah, that’s Jupiter, but that’s Saturn over there.” There’s that person, and here’s this person. They’re separate, they’re definable, they’re categorizable.
Then there’s God, the Creator of all things, the reason why there’s something rather than nothing.
The explanation for the universe itself is not an ingredient in the universe. It’s not a thing among others within the universe.
Very often atheists and agnostics make that fundamental error. They think of God as some big object. “Some say it’s there, some say it’s not. Let’s go find out.” But that’s what God is not.
Therefore, God, in our great tradition, is described as being totaliter aliter. That means not just other, like Jupiter is other than Saturn. God is totaliter aliter. It means he’s “totally other.” God can’t be compared to anything within the world.
It’s not as though, “Well, here’s this thing and then there’s God over there.” Well, then I could define God. Even that word definition —definire. Finis in Latin means a limit. To define something is to set a limit to it.
God can’t be defined. God can’t be delimited.Therefore, he can’t be contrasted with or compared with anything in the world.
Let's start reading the mystics on this
This means that God can’t be seen. Now, don’t think of that as, “Well, there’s some visible things floating around and there’s some invisible things like atoms and all that.”
No, no, God is in principle invisible. He can never come within the scope of my senses or of my mind. When I move into the reality of God, I’m going to that place—I’ll quote U2 here, but they’re relying on the mystics—where the streets have no names.
If the streets have names, I kind of know where I’m going. [...] But when you’re dealing with God, who’s not a thing in the world, you’re going into a place where the streets have no names.
That’s why there’s that great text in our mystical tradition called The Cloud of Unknowing. Think of the cloud on Mount Sinai, the cloud that signals the presence of God. It’s a cloud of unknowing. "I can’t see. I don’t know where I’m going. I can’t get my bearings.”
Oh, the depth of the riches and
wisdom and knowledge of God!
How inscrutable are his judgments
and how unsearchable his ways!
Why is God doing what God is doing? I don’t know, and that’s not a cop-out answer. You see my point?That’s the only answer I can coherently give, given the nature of God.
Now, let me take it a step further. So that’s the undefinable quality of God, but God is also a person. God’s not some dumb object or force. God is a person.
I don’t know about you, but persons are always mysterious. And I’m talking here about human persons.
[A] person always remains elusive and mysterious,because the person has got a hidden, secret identity that is apparent to you only when the person reveals it.
Isn’t it interesting that married couples—married for forty, fifty years—will say, “My husband or my wife is now more mysterious to me than he or she was before.”
That makes perfect sense to me, perfect sense that the more you delve into a human person, the stranger and more elusive and mysterious that person becomes.
Now, combine these two things. God is an infinite, undefinable person. Therefore, how inscrutable his judgments, how unsearchable his ways.
Something like a child and parents
Stay with that last phrase for a second. Think of a little child in relation to his parents. A little three- or four-year-old. And the three- or four-year-old understands, “Oh, my parents love me, but man, do they do strange, inscrutable things. Forcing me to go to bed when I don’t want to. Telling me I can’t do this or that, and that’s the very thing I want.
But when I’m hungry for something and they tell me no, I can’t have it. They take me to this guy wearing a white coat and he sticks needles in me. I don’t know what they’re doing.”
If a child could be given the vocabulary of St.Paul, he would say vis-à-vis his parents,
“How inscrutable they are, how unsearchable their judgments. I don’t know what they’re doing. Somehow I know these two people love me, but boy do they do strange things to express it.”
Well, obviously the little kid doesn’t have the capaciousness of mind to take in what his parents understand[...] Parents get it, but the child, in principle, can’t get it.
Now, take that, and lift it to the infinite degree: the difference between our consciousness and God’s consciousness, the difference between us and this infinite, indefinable person who is God.
Is it puzzling that his judgments seem pretty strange and inscrutable to us? Sure. In fact, the more religious you are, the more you’re going to feel this.
The takeaway is this:
Why do we think for a second that we should be able fully to understand the judgments of God? No, no, “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.”
You say, “Okay, well then where am I left?” Where you’re left, I think where we’re all left, is in the attitude of that child vis-à-vis his or her parents: “I know these people love me. I know that at some deep, instinctual level. I don’t understand why they do everything they do, but yet I will trust. Yet I will trust.”
Now we come to the central teaching of St.Paul, which is what he calls faith. But don’t think of faith propositionally, first of all, as accepting certain propositions.
Think of faith as meaning this existential trust. I’m justified, Paul says, by faith, by this trust in God whose ways and judgments I know remain inscrutable to me.
We are relating to an infinite, indefinable person who loves us. Therefore, in him we place our trust.
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