Why?

Sensing a Presence that I could not deny, I became angry. I was angry that I could not free myself from this Presence. I was angry that this Presence occupied my every thought. When I found that I could not flee the “hound” at my coattails, I turned, like a trapped animal, and fought. That is, after all, what I knew how to do best. I fought, as usual, not from fear but from anger. In my anger, I argued with and questioned this Presence—and even blamed It.

Never before had I questioned why I bore children with birth defects. Since I did not consider that there might be a God whom one could expect to intervene, I just accepted the fact that Donnie and I did not have the most felicitous combination of genes and for that reason 50% of our children suffered from multiple defects. My question, when confronted first with Noelle’s birth defects, then Doah’s, was not “Why?” but “What do we need to do to keep them healthy and prepare them to lead worthwhile lives?”

Only now, with this Presence occupying my thinking space day and night, did the errant thought finally come to me, “Why?” If a deity existed, then I could accept these birth defects and the myriad other tribulations that we had experienced with some degree of equanimity only if that deity were effete. But I knew from teaching social philosophy that the fearsome God of the Jews, the loving God of the Christians, and the almighty albeit gracious and merciful God of the Muslims was anything but effete. Bewildered and hostile, I wanted answers, and I demanded an explanation. I did not conduct a trial and find God guilty as did the senior Jewish leadership at Auschwitz during the Holocaust of WWII. No, my response was much simpler. I asked God why.

Job! Read the Book of Job. More than a thought but less than a voice, the words slammed into my consciousness. Still entranced by a surreal sense of a divine Presence fully occupying all my faculties and even directing my thinking, I accepted these quietly compelling words at face value as an answer to my demand to know why bad things had happened to my family, people whom I considered to be essentially good, even moral. Not only did I surprise myself by accepting these words, but also I reacted to them instinctively, without examination of what I was doing or why, so strong was the Presence in and around me.

While the response to my asking why took less than a minute in coming, the answer took days to understand. From my childhood Sunday School classes, I knew that Job was somewhere in the Old Testament, but I did not even have a Bible. In this case, as in so many other cases where I have needed general research, the Internet rescued me.

I found the Book of Job and read it. Ah, the patience of Job! That is an expression everyone knows. I did not think, though, that the message I was supposed to be getting had anything to do with patience. After all, how does patience explain why children might be born with handicaps?

So, I read the Book of Job again. I read about all the torments and testing, about how Job remained faithful through all the tests. I did not think that was the message I was supposed to be getting, either. That, too, did not explain why children would be born with handicaps. My children were not torments. They were delights.

So, I read the Book of Job a third time, paying attention to how Job’s friends exhorted him to turn his back on God, but instead he turned his back on their advice. This, too, did not seem to be the message I was supposed to be getting for I neither blamed God nor believed in God at the time of my children’s births.

The reading of Job was becoming rather frustrating, and I began to think I would need the proverbial patience of Job to ferret out whatever meaning I was supposed to be getting from it. So, I read the Book of Job a fourth time and began to feel much empathy for him, especially in the loss of his children. I noted well that I had been spared such pain even in the case of SR whom doctors refused to believe would live. An understanding was beginning to emerge but not one that I could articulate. Just one more time and perhaps I would understand!

I read the Book of Job a fifth time, and then I finally got it. It was not the concept of patience that I needed to understand, nor was it a test whose requirements I needed to meet. No, it was the concept of unconditional love that I needed to develop. No matter what was taken from Job or what he had to endure, he continued to love God. That, I think, is a message that is not often preached. More frequently preached is a panoply of "benefits" of coming to Church, being holy (whatever that means), and exercising patience. I don't need to be promised wealth in order to give to God. I don't need to be promised the avoidance of eternal damnation in order to obey God. Nor do I need fear of reprisal to walk along the path that God has laid out. I don't even need to be promised salvation in order to love God. I do all of these things because I want to not because I have to or fear the consequences of not doing them. Love for God is not a selfish love, looking for something we can get from it. It is an unselfish love, like God’s love for us, full of desire to give back to God by modifying our behavior to be worthy of God’s love, serving as God’s instrument for good, and being open to whatever it is that God would have us do.

What the message of Job says to me is that God's presence in our lives and what happens to us and those we care about are separate things. God has promised us to be with us if we allow it. What happens to us, on the other hand, is often a result of free will with which God is determined not to interfere although sometimes God does intervene. Love of God must be unrelated to what happens to us, and our love of God must be as unconditional as is God’s love for us. It took five decades, but I do finally get it. What happens in life—the bad things and the good things—cannot be conditions for whether or not we love God. They are tangential. These things generally come from our own misguided actions allowed by free will, the free will of others that encroaches upon us, the sometimes infelicitous combination of genes as people marry into various gene pools (i.e. the free run of nature), and even perhaps as in the case of Job with the interference of Evil. Just as God’s love for us is unconditional, not depending on whether or not we are always “good” (an impossibility, anyway), so, too, our love for God must be free of conditions. I understood that God was not to blame for any of the bad things that happened to Job or to me, but God has been omnipotent at turning the bad, once it happened, into good.

The reading of Job took care of my question as to why there could be a God and my children might be born with birth defects, why God might not want to intervene, or why it might be better to allow the birth defects to occur. My children’s lives are not defined by their birth defects but by what they do with their lives, how they help others, what they contribute to the world. It is defined not by what they cannot do but rather but what they can do and do do.

There was one more thing, though, one that seems to be overlooked frequently. God protected Job. It did not seem that way to Job because Job was not in on the agreement that God had made with Satan. Satan could take things away from Job and then, later, God even allowed Satan to torment Job physically. Job, however, was never in danger of dying. His life was always in God’s hands and protected by God, as so many times have been my life and the lives of my children even when I, like Job, could not see that anything good at all was transpiring.

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This excerpt comes from my book, Blest Atheist (MSI Press, copyright 2009), prior to copyediting and publication. There are some minor variations between this version and the final print version. The book is essentially my conversion story with all the gory and glorious details.