Four Truths. Steven Schroeder

      “I’ve done nothing. And what could I possibly have done that would explain any of this? I’m sick, ready to die; but I’ve done nothing to deserve it.”

      Another friend said, “You know, J, the world’s a reasonable place, and God’s in charge. Why don’t we get down on our knees right here right now and take it to the Lord in prayer?”

      Like Bird said, J was a trip. You’d think he’d go for an impromptu ritual—but he asked for an attorney!

      “God is my tormenter,” he said. “And I want to sue. All I need is a high enough court and a good enough litigator.”

      He was joking. Or delusional.

      Slick got it. He smiled. I thought for a moment he was going to step forward. Chances are he is an attorney. He looked the part. And he looked ready to take the case.

      But another friend piped in: “Come on, J. You know nobody’s perfect. No need to take God to court; just own whatever you’ve done and ask God to make things right.”

      Slick hung back. I lay low.

      J went off. A long speech about God being in charge and therefore responsible for bad as well as good.

      Now Slick looked like an attorney who expected a substantial out of court settlement—plenty of profit, no trial. He kept smiling.

      J and his friends went at it again. The gist of it was that the friends thought it had to make sense while J insisted that it didn’t but should. He wanted nothing but his day in court.

      By this time, I was tired and hungry—how long had we been at this?—and I was starting to have trouble following the discussion. But I couldn’t leave. I had to see how things would turn out, and I didn’t want Slick or Bird to spot me. I was amazed at Slick’s single-minded concentration. Bird was all over the place, long ago off to other things; but Slick’s attention never wavered. He was right there, attending to one thing alone.

      J was thoroughly ticked off with his reasonable friends. He wanted nothing but a hearing. He was miserable, and he thought he was entitled to shout about it. Too bad he wasn’t aware of Slick there, just listening.

      Then another friend showed up, a young guy, excitable. He wanted to preach. J wanted to smack him, but they all let him proceed with a homily on God’s inscrutability.

      Then Bird showed up out of nowhere with his cold raptor eyes. Nobody knew where he came from, but they’d been at this so long and they were so tired and hungry that hallucinations went without saying. They weren’t surprised, and they let him rant. He went on about taking everything in at once and stared them down one by one with his cold superior raptor eyes.

      I thought Slick would laugh out loud.

      J had nothing to say.

      Bird told J’s friends off, looked around, and was gone.

      More friends showed up, each with a load of gifts. J was rich again.

      Like nothing happened.

      Turns out M had left long ago, and I decided to go find her. J had nothing to say, and M would feed me.

      Bird was gone. Slick was smiling. Bird would come again, and the interval for him would be a breath in a long conversation with his only friend.

      I miss the kids and M. The chauffeur gave me tuna. The Beemer had soft seats. The Mercedes engine well was a warm place to sleep outside in winter.

      The two are old friends. Neither can be trusted.

      I am left alone to tell the tale.

      one: dukha

      1. In “the West,” where Greek thinking took root in Judaism and its offspring, Christianity and Islam, the fact of suffering has given rise to a rich tradition of theodicy. Affirming God’s power and God’s goodness together demands reason of suffering. Suffering without reason poses a problem for God, for faith, or for both.

      2. Reason has clustered as much around control and knowledge as around power and goodness, and theodicies have often been embodied in languages of limits. That human beings cannot make sense of suffering has been attributed to the fact that human intellect is limited: suffering’s senselessness is a result of the partial perspective of finite beings. From a God’s-eye view, the senselessness of suffering is absorbed into the sense of the whole. God’s limitlessness limits suffering—making it disappear at the limit, passing in time or, through some whole seen, passing into something else.

      3. As a language of limits, theodicy turns on finitude and time and is as concerned with sense as with suffering. Suffering that does not pass is punishment: it is incontrovertible evidence that something intrinsic to the sufferer is suffering’s cause. At the limit, there is no innocent suffering, because there can be no suffering without cause.

      4. Which makes theodicy, more often than not, a search for some other to blame.

      5. In Islam, which is most adamant in its affirmation of God’s power, theodicy simply vanishes into reason: there can be no innocent suffering, because God cannot be in any way associated with evil. The problem, then, is not accounting for innocent suffering but rather discovering why it is not innocent. Suffering must be put on trial and the sufferer convicted. Christianity has sometimes taken a similar turn, but it has also admitted an instance of innocent suffering made necessary (and thus explained) by sin. Judaism has often turned on time and embraced patience, confident enough of the end to wait suffering out.

      6. Common to “Western” accounts of suffering is confidence that it dissolves in the power and goodness of God—whether gradually, across time, or all at once, because God’s power is present and absolute in every instant. But what is perhaps less obvious is that this places knowledge against a background of suffering. Because God’s knowledge is not limited, it recognizes that suffering is nothing in itself, only part of a whole that is good. Bearing suffering with patience (submission, as Islam puts it) leads to knowledge that is more like the whole knowledge of God—or subjects us to that knowledge itself. This is not so different from the Greek understanding of passion developed at length in the tradition of tragic drama: what we suffer becomes our teacher, and it is not reality but our vision that changes in the process. Our eyes change in time, so, though nothing changes, time changes everything.

      7. But this confidence in vision poses problems, particularly when one claims to see with God’s eyes—waiting in the expectation of an end (now or then) in which one sees with such eyes: the expectation of an end is a narrative temptation endemic to the West. More than once, an end of history has been used to make mass murder make sense.

      8. In the garden, the temptation was not the fruit: we have no reason to doubt that it was good to eat. The temptation was to be like gods. And that is why a story that begins with old friends meeting like gods in the court of heaven and ends as though nothing had changed should give us pause. The two were old friends. Neither could be trusted. All that accounts for the suffering of Job is a chance encounter and a series of wagers. As if nothing would change.

      9. In the end, the tale survives in the teller alone. We know nothing but the tale in the telling and the trace of the teller.

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