‘To reveal the light fully, we must remove everything that obscures it.’ Photo: by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash
A lot on your plate: Tony D’Souza is challenged at a dinner party
‘God does not create the suffering in the world, we do.’
It was one of those dinner parties where you regret you came even before you get to the soup. My host, by all accounts a man of good character, and an acknowledged pillar of the local community, had firmly-held convictions. The problem was that he had no difficulty sharing them – repeatedly and often, or at least until you came out of your bunker waving a white flag.
We had been treated to his views on Boris Johnson and rising fuel costs, and now he was getting started on Ukraine. This was going to be an expensive dinner, but in forbearance, not money. I glanced at my watch under the tablecloth. Was that really the time? This was going to be a long night. I gave my wife a look – a look a faithful hunting dog might give its owner when sent from a warm fire to a cold kennel on a wet night. It didn’t do me any good.
And that was when it came. I knew it was going to come sooner or later, but I was still taken off guard. My dinner party partner looked at me over the rims of his glasses as a high court judge might regard the accused in the dock.
‘Well, you believe in God don’t you?’ He paused. His eyebrows remained arched, but his eyes mellowed with a look of sympathy, as if I was the unfortunate victim of a contagious disease. ‘If there is a God, why is there so much suffering in the world?’
Well. Where does one start? Obviously not at this dinner party. The chattering classes appear to have lost their manners. They have forgotten it is bad form to discuss sex, religion or politics in polite conversation. So, I left the answer for this article.
The answer to the question ‘If there is a God, why is there so much suffering in the world?’ is surprisingly simple. God does not create the suffering in the world, we do. Humans create suffering. God did not start the war in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin did. All wars, all oppression, and all suffering, is the result of humans acting upon humans – God has nothing to do with it.
Blaming God for the suffering in the world is like blaming the Ministry of Transport for road accidents. The Ministry is not responsible for the deaths on the road, drivers are. The Ministry of Transport provides and maintains the infrastructure of the roads; how the drivers behave has nothing to do with them. It’s the same thing with the evil in the world. In the New Testament the first letter of James says: ‘When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desires and enticed.’ It is our personal choices that cause the evil in the world.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the early Quakers to humanity was the discovery of ‘the Seed’, which is ‘that of God’ in everyone, which roughly equates to conscience (though it is of divine origin). We are free to take heed of the ‘promptings of love and truth’ in our heart, or – and this is what creates our personal and collective tragedy – we can choose to ignore them by drowning them out by our own preferences.
When we first know the Seed, it begins to change us from within, and we begin to turn away from the dark to the light. I can remember the changes it brought about in me. For example, it was impossible for me to buy lottery tickets after I bumped into a group of Spanish waiters relaxing between shifts. They were busy spending all their tip money on lottery scratch cards. I saw for myself how gambling effects the poorest in our society by holding out the false promise of wealth and a quick fix to all of their problems. The Seed made me understand this. It also stopped me indulging in idle gossip because I saw for myself how (even among Quakers) gossip is corrosive to human relationships. The Seed helped me shun it.
God, as the Seed, lives within us, changing us from within and also giving us clear directions if we only take time to listen. Learning to listen is crucial, but it takes practice. One suggestion is that we adopt a regular practice of ten to twenty minutes’ quiet time to listen to God first thing in the morning, and again last thing at night. If you live in a busy household as I do, try waking up before anyone else to have your quiet time listening to God alone before the day begins. Do the same thing in the evening.
When we begin to listen to God, we have to be very careful. Many people mistake ‘the will of God’ for something that suspiciously resembles their own personal inclinations. This is immature listening, and it causes a great deal of harm. If you want to test what you think is right for you, ask at least three people who are independent of the outcome or the question. If they are unbiased, they will give you a good idea how to proceed. Only after frank and honest testing is it advisable to proceed, and even then do so with great caution. Remember, God only has four answers: Yes; no; not yet; and ‘Please tell me you are not being serious’.
The light is always within us. However, to reveal it fully, we must remove everything that obscures it. As the psychologist Carl Jung once wrote, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate’. In much the same way, we will remain blind until we bring what is unconscious into consciousness. All we need to do is observe ourselves. That’s all. Just sit in a chair and be aware. Be aware of everything around you and, most of all, be aware of your thoughts. Soon you will see that thoughts are like clouds passing in the sky. The clouds pass, but the blue of the sky remains. Awareness dispels the darkness in us. Until we know and accept it, we will always have the potential to cause havoc and do evil without even realising it. Even our impulse to do good will be corrupted by it. Observing the self is never a comfortable process, but for the light to increase in us we have to do it. Nobody can do it for us.
The answer to the question ‘Where is God in all this?’ is simple. There is ‘that of God’ in everyone, and our actions can never be truly pure until they are wholly guided by the spirit. As the ancient Chinese proverb has it:
If there is light in the soul,
there will be beauty in the person.
If there is beauty in the person,
there will be harmony in the house.
If there is harmony in the house,
there will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation,
there will be peace in the world.
Comments
Thanks for thought provoking thoughts! And being trapped like this at a social event is always a tough challenge in the moment that it happens - pointless to recite a credal statement even if we had one.
I don’t really get the Ministry of Transport analogy though. The MoT (in theory at least) represents collective responsibility to maintain effective, safe routes for people and goods to move around… so what it does (or doesn’t do) has a big impact on the way individual travellers behave on those routes. Simply put the analogy could include creative input from all travellers to make a better way than ‘their own personal inclinations’ might drive them on?
By Simon C on 23rd June 2022 - 18:09
The Chinese proverb makes it all a unity - which is what most people who ask that question miss. In a world where our relationships are increasingly one-to-one and mercantile, for example, where health is something to be bought for me and not provided for us, the idea of transcending that narrow notion is increasingly rare. It could be argued that that is what we do in worship. Feel for the unity.
By huw_nant on 24th June 2022 - 14:37
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