10/50: 29 years ago today
This song has become a favorite this year. A beautiful theology of mystery and faith.
“Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm:
’Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.”
September 20 is always a somber day for me. In 1992, my friend and adopted big brother, Tim, was killed by gunshot.
Nearly thirty years later, I am at a loss to adequately represent the ways that lives were altered, but I am in the company of many who point to that day as a moment of departure.
For me, it was a violent awakening to suffering and big questions about how the world works. In the months to follow, I would find my faith and inner life needed to expand to hold that much pain. Tim’s death resulted in me seeking therapy for the very first time. It shook my theology from its pat answers. It opened the margins of my soul which opened me up to the margins of the world. Since then, I’ve always insisted on a way of faith that is big enough to hold that much tragedy and does not offer simple answers to senseless suffering.
One thing that I will never say again is that everything happens for a reason.
I believe Tim died AND good things came out of the tragedy. But Tim didn’t die SO THAT good things could come. I don’t think God works that way.
That small reframing in how we see tragedy is so important. It seems people give God blame or credit for all sorts of things that I don’t think God did. While I cannot know the mind of Divine wisdom, I choose to hold a good level of agnosticism when it comes to how God intervenes in the workings of human affairs.
I’m pretty sure I have witnessed miracles and divine interventions, but I am slow to give them a lot of credit. I don’t think God is somewhere pulling strings giving me the good parking space in front of the Pilates studio while a hurricane is decimating a village in Mexico. So, I stay open to mystery, but I don’t hold God responsible for what happens.
I think everyone has to make those kinds of tradeoffs no matter how you put together your theodicy (the theological construct of why good things happen to bad people), because it’s simply too big a question to fully grasp.
On this day, I smile and remember my big-hearted friend who always showed me such deep kindness and imagine that twinkle in his eye as the Great Mystery of Love.