Reflections on Beauty and Suffering

I don’t understand how people become so bored with life. I guess I empathize, since I often join their ranks, but I can’t quite grasp the vanity and laziness that blinds a man to the miracle of existence—millions of men march over the sidewalks of this city in the shadows of impossibly tall buildings, delicate towers of steel and glass that grope for heaven and catch the sun in their panes and paint their faces for evening like girls out on the town. These same men wend their way around equal millions of beautiful women—divine strangers, all soft skin, soft smells, soft curves, mysterious eyes, and secretive lips—as though running an obstacle course. Some may cut through the Park, crushing blades of grass underfoot and dodging trees as they would lamp-posts, as though they walked on dead, silent ground, rather than swam through a sea of life—billions of tiny cells changing sunlight to sugar, and sugar to ATP, building and packaging and shipping proteins, warring with one another, passing messages, growing and expanding—a microscopic civilization nestled with a green—green! the wonder of the simple fact that plants are green and not a plain tope or charcoal!—blade that any passing giant might smash into nothingness.
Life has such a precarious quality, almost as though the universe were simply a soap bubble drifting through God’s kitchen, a fragile beauty captured in a momentary form. Every skyscraper seems an inch from breaking apart like a child’s Lego tower, and indeed, it is a miracle of God that it doesn’t. Skeptics bluster that laws and science account for this happy accident—but who says that laws and science are necessary and essential? The very fact that we can conceive of them as being different than they are seems to suggest that they are not. I cannot imagine a world where 5 + 5 = 9, but I can very well imagine a world without gravity, or, to quote Friends, a world in which “I’m being pushed onto the ground, not pulled.” Perhaps I only imagine this because I haven’t yet looked as closely into the universe’s gear-box as I have into the laws of logic, but I doubt it. I think that the universe is a beautifully arranged machine, and that its hardware runs very efficiently, maybe even in the best possible way, but like all machines, it could be built very differently and still accomplish the same purpose, or even accomplish a very different purpose.
All this speculation on the essentiality of physics and other nonsense only brings me back (I must wander the entire circumference of my face to find my nose—forgive me) to my original thought—the universe is a precious, wonderful piece of ingenuity. Every flower is filled with the glory of the God, and modern man seems to know nothing of it—he spends his life blindly stumbling from place to place, banging his head against his neighbor’s and cursing him for it, occasionally catching a glimpse of light or form—enough, anyway, to keep him moving—and his explanation of this insanity is that the universe is insane, that all is void and formless. Materialism is the newest and worst idolatry—Man renders himself vast by shrinking the universe to so many coincidences and chance collisions, but finds that he is king over nothing but smoke and mirrors. He tried to burn the Throne of God, and found that the ravenous fire licked up his house, too.
I think that the easiest way to refute a materialist is to lie down in a meadow and stare up at a blue sky through a lacework of trees, or stand on the roof of a skyscraper and look out on the steel peaks, and let the glory of God well up in you. For, the materialist has no answer for beauty—he can break it into its constituents, discover the molarity of its solutions, describe the vector movements of its pieces, map its chemical pathways, but for all that, he has no answer for the poetry of a first kiss.
I know this is an old idea, but like all brash young fools, I believe deep in myself that I am the first to discover it. That’s the hilarious part about truth, and the place where I resonate most deeply with old G. K. Chesterton—we stumble upon it blindly, thinking ourselves the blazers of a new trail, only to find that it is well-worn path leading to an eight-lane highway—“there is nothing new under the sun.”
I am beginning to piece this vision of a rare and beautiful Creation together with a darker concept. In at least one respect, the Materialist seems to have a formidable argument against the form and order he so hates—for this world is also a dark and terrible place. I see this so clearly in New York—half the time, I walk with my head craned to the sky, entranced by the mammoth buildings that hedge the streets, and the other half, I glance uncertainly from side to side, from panhandler to panhandler, from the maimed and blind to the drunks and the emaciated crack-addicts who plead for handouts and mercy. When I think about these poor creatures, my heart sinks within me, and the universe contracts, becoming small and grey and bleak. Sometimes I stop to buy one of them a sandwich, and as I listen to him talk about his struggles with addiction, or with unfeeling family, or some evil corporation, or an impersonal government, I can muster only one thought as I nod along encouragingly—“You were not meant to live like this.”
I have a good measure of respect for agnostics who reject religion because the world seems too evil. I have absolutely no respect for those who reject religion because they claim that men need no objective code of values, or that the human race is perfecting itself through its own efforts—a deadly fork in the road, one path leading to Subjectivism, or a diffuse Existentialism, the other leading to an illusion called “Progress.” Both flavors of Materialism exalt man to a god-like status, giving him ultimate authority over his existence. These beliefs have lead man, respectively, to the sort of depravity common to American culture today, and to the atrocities perpetrated under social theories of Progress in Fascist and Communist states.
To me, anyone who claims to disbelieve in man’s sin nature—a universal gravitation towards evil, a default position of corruption—either lies to himself, or suffers delusions. Every culture in history has wrestled with the evil that grows like a fungus on every flowering of man’s heart, and all have identified certain uniform aspects of that failing—he tends toward self-worship, cowardice, violence, covetousness, heedlessness, deception. To call a man sinful implies some kind of absolute (objective) standard—you may only call me a mediocre surfer if you can conceive of a great surfer. There’s simply no way around this—people who claim to embrace an “individual, personal morality”—one that does not impose its values on others—are liars, plain and simple. That claim is impossible to live out. Perspective is key in this instance—if all individuals must determine their own morality, then no one has any right to call Hitler evil—he made his choice, just as I made mine. Silly, just silly.
As I said, I really respect those few who recoil from the idea of God with horror in the face of starvation, war, and AIDS in Africa; child sex-trafficking in Thailand; and the billions of petty hurts men inflict on one another daily. If this world is really that magical, wondrous place that enchants me daily, it seems that it is a realm under evil dominion, a place where good is constantly struggling to survive the unrelenting attacks of evil.
Once, my cousins and I dammed up a tiny stream just short of where it trickled into the Pacific on the Oregon Coast. We used nothing more than our frantic arms to shovel sand into the creek-bed, at times strategically placing a tiny boulder to hold the dam’s shape. The dam went up pretty quickly, thanks to our exuberance and some real ingenuity from a couple nine year-olds, and the stream seemed beaten—for a few precious moments, only a thin trickle escaped over the sides. However, the water quickly chewed through the dam’s foundation, sweeping the sand away, dislodging the rocks, opening fist-sized gaps. We worked for more than an hour, trying to repair the walls, but all we managed was an agonizing retreat before the power of nature. Sometimes I think sin is like that—it meets us at every turn, defying our every resolution for good, seeping through cracks in what we thought were airtight defenses.
Now, many brilliant theologians and philosophers have undercut this idea by pointing to God’s providence, his promises of eventual restoration for Creation and righting of all wrongs. I won’t be so arrogant as to disagree with men wiser than I—rather, I generally agree with and respect them—but I don’t think that a five point argument explaining the relationship between man’s spiritual Fall and his estrangement from the rest of Creation carries a great deal of weight with a starving Sudanese child.
I think there is a much simpler, more relevant unity of good and evil than the intellectual solutions we dream up. First, I must accept certain facts of man’s history. Fact One: Man was created as a perfect being, but he chose self-worship over love of God, and wrecked himself. God allowed man to do this because He wants to be loved, not merely worshipped, and love is always a choice. Fact Two: The Fall devastated all of Creation—man became estranged from God, Nature, other men, and himself. Ever since Adam, terrible things have abounded on the Earth. Fact Three: God has an amazing habit of reaching into to this broken place and restoring some of its former beauty—He very often turns the worst things to great glory. As Isaiah says, God gives “all who mourn…a crown of beauty, instead of ashes, the oil of gladness, instead of mourning, and a garment of praise, instead of a spirit of despair.”
If you step back to the context of chapter 61 in Isaiah, he’s expounding a prophecy about the Messiah (Jesus actually reads these verses in a synagogue and applies them to himself)—he will “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” a time of restoration and blessing for all who have been “brokenhearted” or “poor.” I love this passage, not just for its poetry and its grand scope, but for its treatment of suffering—Isaiah doesn’t try to justify suffering; he doesn’t try to nullify it, or hide it behind some smoke-and-mirrors trick that God pulls. He simply accepts evil’s existence, and then shows how God brings goodness into being in its midst.
Today, it seems like Christians have a burgeoning inferiority complex regarding evil—they are constantly talking about how God will use every famine and plague for some grand design yet to be revealed, or how every instance of pain is God’s way of teaching someone a lesson about life or spirituality. I recently talked with a friend whose sister is a recovering crack-addict. He related how a relative of his had suggested that this poor girl’s ten years of addictions might have served to teach him (the brother) to forgive, and to restore her relationship with their father. Listening to this argument, I could only bury my head in my hands in sheer wonder—how incredibly arrogant can we be? In his providence, God may well be weaving their tragedies into a beautiful harmony with the rest of history, but I have to believe that his designs are beyond me, that they make sense only from an eternal perspective. I refuse to sit in judgment on another’s pain, to see the anguish in my friend’s eyes and dryly intone, “God works all things to his glory.” I don’t doubt that he does, but suffering will ever be an incomprehensible, heart-breaking consequence of the Fall to me.
I think that Isaiah’s is a healthier view of suffering. The year of the Lord’s favor does not commence with a discourse justifying the world’s suffering; it begins with the Messiah coming to “bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives.” It seems to say, “Yes, there is evil, but there is also God.” I can understand God’s allowing sin, and I can conceive of God turning sin to good, but my heart leaps within me when God comes to Earth to take man’s sin on himself, to respond to sin, not just with vague promises and argument, but with action, sowing grace and mercy and hope into the despair of the Fall.
I find a similar response to evil in Habakkuk, a tiny little book in the Minor Prophets. Habakkuk comes to God and asks Him to justify himself—“Your eyes are too pure to look on evil…Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?” God begins by pronouncing various woes and censures against the wicked and against idols (almost as though he is simply agreeing with Habakkuk, with a faint trace of irony in his voice). After paragraphs of this, he abruptly switches tracks, and finishes, “But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him.”
I love this—God catalogues all the evils of the world, and then simply says, “But, I am still here.” To the problem of pain, he offers no argument, but rather, himself. Habakkuk is so struck by this that he abandons his aggressive questioning and launches into a prayer of adoration, climaxing with, “though the olive crop fails, and the fields produce no food,..yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.”
God needs no argument against suffering. He brings himself into the midst of suffering and heals every wound, loves the abandoned, dies for those enslaved to sin. Our theology need not consist in a mud-slinging campaign mounted on God’s behalf against evil. Evil exists, but by the grace and glory of God, goodness exists alongside it, able to comfort and restore the greatest of despair.