Chaos

The last two or three weeks have been both very busy and very emotional for me. Just too much going on and too much to think about. It's times like these when I start getting angry, first at life and then at God. And that's when I start critiquing the universe and pondering why everything's so screwed up. Next comes self-pity, frustration, rebellion, and ultimately chaos. It's a little viscous cycle I go through from time to time -- more often than I care to admit.

Things kind of came to a boil yesterday when I found myself watching one of these horrible shows on television that show humanity at its worst. This one happened to be on sex slavery -- young girls being forced into prostitution. As I watched, I kept asking, "how can God let this happen?"

This begs the question, "how can God let a lot of things happen?" How can he let wars, and executions, and torture happen? How can he let birth defects, famine, and disease happen? And so on and so on. This is another little cycle that I get trapped in from time to time.

The temptation is to give up on God or, at the very least, to distance myself from God. "I don't understand God. I don't understand his ways. I don't understand why he lets these things go on. Therefore, I'm just going to keep my distance ...ignore things. Just do what I want and try not to think about it."

This is when I begin to unravel.

It's hard to explain. So let me borrow an illustration that was once given to me by a Greek Orthodox priest.

He told me that truth, or order, or sense, if you will (i.e., that which makes sense) is central to who God is. When we move towards that center, things that don't make sense to us now will begin to. Or at least we will begin to trust God and have peace. He said the opposite of that center is chaos. The nature of evil is not so much nefarious as it is chaotic. It is the absence of reason, the absence of order, the absence of truth. Chaos is dangerous because there is no order and there is no truth. Rather, we become the arbiters of reality. And that's when people lose their senses and all kinds of nightmarish things occur.

There's a great quote from theatrical literature that underscores this. It's from the play The Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt.

Thomas More is arguing with William Roper, his son-in-law, against the idea of vigilante justice and people being their own arbiters of truth. Roper, in turn, maintains that it's alright to violate the law for the greater good. But then More questions who's to decide what that greater good is. At the height of the argument, More says:

"And when the last law was down and the devil turned round on you,
where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is
planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, man's laws, not God's, and if
you cut them down, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds
that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the devil the benefit of the law for my
own safety's sake."

His point here is that we need rules. He's talking about the civil law of course, but the idea that without rules we are indeed subject to the "winds that would blow" is well taken.

Earlier in the passage he makes an equally astute observation about God's law.

"I am not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can't navigate. I'm no voyager."

His point here being that we as humans can't fully comprehend God's will. What he's confronting here is the lynch mob mentality of his son-in-law, wanting to take the law into his own hands. More does acknowledge that God's laws are indeed superior to man's, but that we're are not in the position of enforcing them as much as we are deferring to them. It is not our purview to figure them out as much as it is to obey them. Hence the need for our own civil law -- something we can navigate.

Therefore, I defer to God again regarding the evils of this universe. Adopting such an attitude doesn't make everything make sense, but it does place the burden on the proper shoulders (God's, not mine).

C.S. Lewis, in his book A Grief Observed, where he was trying to make sense of the tragically non-sensical death of his wife, concluded that, "Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our contradictory notions. The notions will be knocked from under our feet."

I submit to God's sovereignty thereby placing myself away from the outer fringes of chaos. Let us pray for those who dwell there.