I know a woman who gets parked in front of a television every day to watch CBC Newsworld.  If she lived in a nursing home she would be in a lounge, usually with others, watching daytime TV:  talk shows, game shows, nothing consequential but generally upbeat.  “Babysitting TV” for people in wheelchairs to fall asleep to or that won’t agitate them.  Me, I’d be really agitated to be left in front of a large screen television to hear people who knew nothing about me offer tips on how to live my life.  But she doesn’t.  Her caregivers know she has a good mind and limited mobility so they set her in front of a screen on which she can literally watch the world whoosh by.

She can’t use the controller, and is only articulate about what she sees and hears if you ask.  Her hearing and vision are fine, it’s the rest of her body that won’t let her continue to explore her world.  She teaches me.  I’ve been schooled by reflective people from Job, who was not patient, by the way, who had enough courage to keep asking “Why?”, to this woman in her 90’s.  Like Job who sat in the dust and watched his life fall to pieces before his eyes, this woman can’t always escape the news that is broadcast seemingly directly to her. 

 She doesn’t ask “Why?” as far as I know.  She seems to know there isn’t much of an answer.  No one who might offer one feels at all accountable to her.  She grasps history and economics and could offer insightful commentary on the causes of much of what she watches.  Although I can’t say for sure I believe she may even have stopped asking God for an explanation.  She seems content to know, as Ecclesiastes wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun.”  Of course I am guessing in part;  it’s just that she is one of the few people I know who doesn’t always need to know why. 

I doubt she would put it in these terms, but I don’t think she believes that God or the universe owes her a reason, she doesn’t need to hold either of them accountable.  She continues to believe that she is accountable for her actions and attitudes.  She makes me think we’d all hurt a lot less if we were more consistent in being accountable to others than demanding they be accountable to us.

Faith helps us deal with hurt.  Our faith in God, our faith in the people who love us, their faith in us.  I understand there are many who view the concept of faith as a weakness or delusional.  Sometimes I lack the intellect to fully refute their insights.  But contrary to what many claim, faith is not a comfortable place to live.  It requires a degree of trust in a reality that is beyond what we can know with our senses or our science.

Faith does not displace science.  We need both. I am fascinated and engaged by the discoveries of neuroscience.  The more we know the better we are able to help each other. For example, the knowledge that people become hard-wired into our neural pathways helps me make sense of people’s telling me they can sense or even hear someone who has died.  The dead do live on with us because they become a permanent part of our memories.  And if we are wise enough to record what we knew and know of them then they live into another generation.

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that faith is the evidence of things not seen, the assurance of things hoped for.  Faith is about living with the hope of more, more to discover, more richness (not riches) in a world that we are wise to treat as a gift, one not to be exploited.

My “definitions” of God, are really understandings that help shape my thinking and then develop or change as someone presents me with a clearer description.  They have changed over time.  As I write this the words that encompass, without limiting my understanding of the Divine, are that God is the informing compassion and wisdom of the universe.  Take the word informing in more than one way.  God is who or what not only informs us but in-forms compassion and wisdom in us.

This is something of a riff on Paul Tillich’s description of God as the Ground of Being, but it also relates to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writing about Jesus, the Man for Others who reveals God to us.  Some of you will understand that phrase as a description of a personal God.  Some of you will understand it as a description of a supra-personal reality.  Either should help us understand our current reality.  

[Whilst] everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates.  That informing power or spirit is God....And is this power benevolent or malevolent?  I see it as purely benevolent.  For I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists.  Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light.  He is Love.  He is the supreme Good.  -Mahatma Gandhi 

Listening to a story means we might feel some of the hurt in that person's life.   Our own stories already have lots of pain.  Another tale of woe is the last thing we need.  There is more hurt, more sadness in this world than most of us can imagine.  There is more joy than we can imagine too, but we have a knack for focusing on the bad stuff.  It draws our attention. It exhausts us:  dealing with our own bad stuff and the suffering of the people we love and what the news brings us every day.

No one escapes.  We can’t because, as Harold Kushner wrote, bad things happen to good people.

I long ago gave up trying to offer explanations for why those things happen.  Most of what I have heard has been a lame attempt by someone to justify their own limited world view.  Or it lets them live with some comfort at having avoided most of that sadness.  Or they surrender control of their lives to a force greater than they because they want anything that isn’t benevolent in their lives to beyond their control.

This is not the same surrender of people in a twelve-step programme who choose to confess to the reality of a higher power of some description.  They do this not to evade responsibility or thinking about the destruction they have to take responsibility for, but for the sake of discovering that they are not alone in their journey away from that destruction.

No, this is making God responsible for everything, and then being able to slough it off as His Will:  God needed that person to die, God needed to build character in you, God needed to glorify himself by showing how that person could transcend their suffering until their death.  Why do we think God needs any of that?  Why do we think God needs anything?

Why are we willing to help the people we give time to?  Of course because they are close family or friends.  Of course.  And there are people who are like us so it’s easy to sit with them in their difficulties. And there are people who are not us, who are less advantaged than we;  we give to them because we have been raised with a sense of noblesse oblige: those with more have an obligation to those with less.  We give to them because it makes us feel better about ourselves or less guilty about what we have.  We give to them because at some level we are like the Pharisee Jesus talked about who thanked God that he wasn’t like that other benighted sinning tax-collector.  Giving to someone who lacks what we have is a back-alley way of re- affirming our superiority.

The way to avoid this is to listen for what someone needs before giving them anything.  Hear their story, put yourself in it.  Say to yourself “There but for the grace of God go I” – which by the way can be another way of claiming superiority by saying you are more blessed by God because you have earned more grace – and consider what it would be like to be the person in the story.

Stories matter.  People come to churches for financial help for food and gas but never for cigarettes.  Sometimes they want the help and want to leave.  Sometimes they want to tell you their story.  The story can be a way of extracting more from you, it’s part of the game.  I like to listen to the stories; I’m more than happy to part with some cash because I’ve been part of a great fiction.  Mostly, though, if someone isn’t running a game on you, they want someone to hear their story.  Listening gives them dignity restores a little of the dignity it costs to ask someone for food.  You get a little bit for yourself too.

Ransom, my dog, and I walk a familiar path through a Conservation Area.  In the early morning we can count on some privacy, he alone with his curiousity and me with my thoughts.  One day as we walked I could hear someone talking.  I expected to find a kid coaxing frogs out of the pond.  We came around a corner past some trees and Ransom sat.  Without being asked.  There before us was a woman on her knees, face to the ground, murmuring.  Her long skirt covered her lower body, and her sweater covered the rest, including her head.  The sweater was covered in mosquitoes.   I assume she was part of a Mennonite group in our town with their own culture and who mostly keep to themselves.  I urged the dog forward, hoping to quietly walk by her.  Her murmuring had the cadences and tones of a prayer of petition.  A very earnest one.  Of distress.  Ransom got a little closer, decided he wasn’t sure what I was getting him into, and bolted back down the path.

We all react that way some time or another.  Not just because this was an intensely private moment, but because it is an encounter with suffering.  I have many times wanted to bolt.  To avoid sharing someone else’s pain.  Avoid the risk of self-discovery, avoid opening myself to a certain amount of suspension of who I am to develop a greater sense of the One who May Be.  To walk away, at a good clip, from a life of giving to others and helping them make sense out of things.  Who really wants to sit with a sufferer and experience a sense of helplessness?  We don’t always have a lot of choice.  If we are going to interact with each other in an authentic way – as people – we aren’t going to avoid suffering.

I don’t know if the woman in the forest wanted the ground to swallow her up or couldn’t raise her face but her tone and posture made me want to help her.  Maybe that’s what she was asking of God.  Something had to change.

But I didn’t understand her words – she was speaking in what I recognised as Low German – and this was an agonisingly private moment.  I followed Ransom.