By the time I gather my coat and load my backpack, the sun has been down for two hours. I place my work shoes neatly in their box–indicated by the label reading “Edmonson Hal Massoth” on the outside, walk across the cold linoleum to where my boots are waiting. Outside, the snow is gusting horizontally to the ground. It is dark, and the road home will be lit by the taillights ahead of me.
The herd of shadows jogs by as I open the door. The rustling of their synthetic baseball jackets filters through the wind as they shout “Gokurousamadeshita!”–”Thanks for all the hard work”–taking care to individually remove their caps, genuflecting in my direction. The captain, a seventh grader, continues his barked cadence. He urges them on for another five laps around the grounds. I turn the ignition, and look for them in my mirrors, but they are gone from sight.
In my experience, major newspapers usually avoid wading into the headwaters of theology unless the events of the day leave no other course–The Danish Cartoon Incident, for instance, or ongoing coverage of tensions in Afghanistan or Iraq. That’s a reasonable policy in my estimation, if for no other reason than that it’s not in the interests of a publication’s coverage–not to mention their bottom line–to tackle such personal and divisive ideas beyond how they interact with matters of policy, human rights, and liberty in general.
So seeing James Wood’s op-ed grace the Times’s website last week was a somewhat unexpected surprise . In his piece, entitled “Between God and a Hard Place”, Woods tactfully suggests that theological responses to the recent earthquake in Haiti–and, for that matter, virtually all natural catastrophes–are wrought with inconsistencies, and that theodicy is as futile an intellectual exercise as could ever be devised. To those of who have a degree in such futility, this is not exactly an earth-shattering revelation. That said, the piece is really exquisite, and well worth ten minutes of your time at work when–let’s face it, eh?–you weren’t doing anything important anyway. Here, though, is what stuck with me:
Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are, at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.
Woods voices the same skepticism I have always felt around theodicy. Those of us who view our lives and experiences through the prism of God seem to have an almost gravitational attachment to explanations, and to certainty. Without even being conscious of it we seek a known outcome, or the certain frame of the Big Picture. We do this, it must be said, not because it allows us to explain things like Port-Au-Prince or Birkenau. Even if an earthquake is some sort of divine retribution or a boon wrapped in atrocious clothing, the rhyme or reason of who lives or who dies remains unanswered. And if God is uninvolved, or is the ‘impotent God’ invoked by Berkowitz, then our understandings of how or why God figures into anything–let alone our repeated invocations of God’s actions–are as irrational and irrelevent as ever. Theodicy is painfully aware of this, and thus its certitudes deal in ends rather than means. They exhort us to keep our eye on the light at the end of the tunnel, rather than stare keenly at the darkness flashing in our peripheral vision.
I understand fully the human predilection for optimism, but I cannot identify with the dominant approaches to theodicy. In the absence of any sort of plausible hypothesis of God’s role in disasters, all that is left is uncertainty, and that’s a scary thing. It shatters the boundaries of our theological reflection, and puts paid to our desire to bring mental order to external chaos. In embracing uncertainty, we lose the privilege of easy categorization. We can no longer assign events monikers such as ‘tragedy’, ‘justice’, ‘revenge’. And on a more fundamental level, it erodes the basis of many people’s relationship with God. We no longer can speak with any conviction in saying that God is “watching out for us”, or even that we should simply “trust God”.
For a number of reasons, I’ve been forced to think about the Book of Job quite a bit in the last couple of days. Most if it doesn’t bear going into, but I always bristle at the suggestion that Job was a perfect, faithful servant–a righteous sufferer par excellence. Not because I wouldn’t phrase it that way, but because I think most people use those terms to mean patient, humble, trusting, and loving of God despite the cascade of sorrow visited upon him. They tend, I fear, to forget the 30 chapters in which Job wails on God from the heap of ruins. His searing anger, burning sense of injustice, and indictments of God as capricious, unfaithful, and cruel are somehow seen as an asterisk to the story, a believer’s momentary doubt amid the overwhelming, obvious truth of God’s love and justice. Job’s words read as many things, but wavering and conflicted are not among them. It is an accusation, and one that–ultimately–goes unanswered. All that God reveals in the theophany is that God exists, is all-powerful, and is not accountable to anyone. And really, that’s where Job’s relationship stands even when his fortunes are restored. He recants his disrespect, but never the substance of his complaint. There is a recognition that they must deal with each other, but the certainty of how such dealings will go is gone.
That’s where events like the earthquake in Haiti remind us constantly that we are. Nothing is certain–the divine included. If we are unable to relate to uncertainty, to relate to darkness on its own terms, then perhaps–to paraphrase Gustavo Gutierrez–we do not relate to God, only to ourselves.
Over cups of green tea and English textbooks, Noro-Sensei and I discuss the tendency of Japanese education to prioritize memorization. I explain why it is that I don’t do the recommended chants when teaching elementary schoolers–because language is fluid, and like movement cannot be merely recited if it is to serve its only real purpose.
Noro-Sensei asks what American schools do about radicals. Or, rather, she asked what we do about 根号–it is only when she writes √3 on the scratch paper that augments our respective vocabularies that I understand. I explain that we are taught what it means, and how to interact with it–how to transform and think about them, how they interact with each other, and how to express them in terms of themselves.
Noro-Sensei then writes the radical form of every irrational root from one to ten, with an ‘equals’ sign to their right. Without pause to recall, she writes each of them in decimal form to ten digits. She is 46 years old.
The following picture was taken by Shiratori-Sensei, a friend of mine in Aomori. It is a photo of an actual, physically present road sign somewhere in rural Hokkaido:
The bottom sign translates roughly to “Drive at 60 km per hour, and close your windows”
This, it turns out, is the beginning of a Melody Road. I’m beginning to realize that so many of Japan’s industrial accomplishments are the result of a twisted Edmund Hilary-esque approach to engineering.
…I find new meanings in old favorite poems.
JapanToday I pass the time reading It feels like eating I walk through the house reciting it I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it. I listen to myself saying it, And when the dog looks up at me, It’s the one about the one-ton temple bell and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating When I say it at the window, When I say it at the mirror, And later, when I say it to you in the dark, and the moth has flown -Billy Collins |
First work I’ve put online in ages. Enjoy, and comment as you will–I’ll mod them, however.
via Andrew Sullivan:
Right now, I’m correcting 8th grade compositions on theme “what is your dream for the future”. One of my students wrote this sentence: “I want to be a police men in the future”.
To use this as an opportunity to teach about plural/singular nouns, or to suggest ‘police officer’ as a gender neutral alternative: that is the question…
I’ve been giving some crazy thought to investing in an SLR camera. Shots like this are just one more reason why.
To my amazement, a gem from a member of the editorial board of the National Review (via The Opinionator at NYT):
[referring to comments opposing the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and co. in Federal Court] These readers disagreed with my decision to welcome a trial here in New York —precisely because they fear that it will be a fair trial, in which the defendants may be acquitted. Here’s one: “I think what has people very worried is the perception that our legal system is so biased in favor of the accused that a conviction is hardly a sure thing. . . . Many things can happen which would result in our enemies walking away free; that is my worry, and I suspect the worry of many others.” Here’s another: “It is not that we fear 12 jurors cannot be found to mete out justice in New York City. It is that we fear that defense attorneys will obstruct justice and make this trial a circus of the worst kind. Can you say ACLU?”
In other words: Some people oppose this trial precisely because they fear it will not be a show trial. They recognize that there is always a chance that the prosecution might lose. I ask readers to stop for a moment and think about what that says about our country.
Potemra pretty much hits it out of the park here. I’ve always been bewildered by the question of whether terrorists ‘deserve’ constitutional protections or the process afforded by the United States criminal court system–not because I think the answer is ‘yes’, but because it strikes me as beyond irrelevant. Do those who attack the Justice Department’s decision suggest that while someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad does not deserve a fair trial, individuals such as Ted Bundy, or domestic terrorists such as Scott Roeder and Eric Rudolph do? What about Timothy McVeigh, or Nadal Malik Hason–individuals against whom the evidence was and, respectively, is, rather insurmountable?
The question isn’t what these despicable creatures deserve. Not a one of them, empirically speaking, deserve any protections, rights, comforts, or provisions whatsoever. And I doubt there’d be much argument that in the retributive sense, at least, the justice appropriate to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad is beyond the capability of any society to mete out. Had the Attorney General announced at his press conference that KSM would be burned, drawn and quartered on Wall Street, I’m sure there would be some who’d be disappointed at the leniency of such a sentence. But having a threshold of heinousness at which we throw trials out the window completely negates the purpose of having any trials for any purpose. It seeks to codify the principle that the more serious the crime, the less we as a society care about justice for the victims, and about truly punishing those responsible, so long as someone is punished–swiftly and mercilessly.
So no, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and his band of murderers do not deserve the protections they will be given. And that frankly could not matter less. Because when we seek to deal out that which is deserved without regard for that which is fair and consistent, we become an ugly, ugly society indeed.
