Quid pro quo

My father's death led to an interesting revelation for me. While I was finding myself drawn closer to God by grief, my grandmother (the one I used to annoy by claiming there was no God) felt deeply betrayed.

My dad was her oldest son and, frankly, her favorite. When he died, she was angry with God. She would say "Why did He take Carroll?" "Why didn't He take me?" "Why would He do this to me?" She seemed to feel like years of Sunday School teaching, missionary work (bringing Christ to the heathen Lutheran in Minnesota...) and right living were supposed to count for something. Build a bulwark against anything bad happening in her life. She told me she had lost her faith.

The irony of it still fascinates me. Here I, the agnostic, was finding faith in God through grief, while my grandmother, the life-long Christian, was losing hers.

I think it has to do with expectations. I have never expected anything from God. I don't blame God for the bad things that happen to me, nor do I consider God responsible for the good things that happen to me, not in a direct way. When I think of God, I imagine something that is so vast and powerful that it completely overwhelms our ability to understand. And thinking of a relationship with God as some kind of quid pro quo seems to reduce it to human terms which are way too limiting to really describe what's going on with God.

When I think of good things coming from God, I think of the harmony of the universe, the variety and beauty of creation, and those good things that come to me personally when I am in tune with that harmony, that beauty.

I do not believe that God reached down and personally took my father's life, nor do I believe that God turned a blind eye to the suffering of millions during the Holocaust, for example. That's thinking of God as if God were a human ruler, with power over people but the limited perspective that we all have that only allows us to see our own sliver of reality.

I was just asking myself: "Don't you believe God can do anything?" And the answer I came up with was "I believe God can be anything." The key to the way I see it is the difference between action and being.

So anyway, the point is: as I saw it then, God did not take my Dad. Dad died. And God grieved with me. I did not feel abandoned. I felt loved.