I’ve been listening to a lot of Tom Waits recently. A song whose refrain keeps getting stuck in my memory is that of Georgia Lee from 2000’s 1999’s Mule Variations. A bit about the song (I’ve read the song’s context in several places, but this was the best summary I could find online…):
[Waits] wrote it after the body of a 12-year-old girl was found not far from his house.
If I remember the story correctly, she’d been dumped there in a patch of trees, and her death barely made the newspapers. It was around the time of the Polly Klaas case — or during some other search for a photogenic white girl — and Waits was disturbed at the thought that kids like Georgia Lee don’t get as much ink because they’re black or poor or troubled or not photogenic or … (source)
The chorus to Georgia Lee runs:
Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for Georgia Lee?
I’m not one normally given to over-sentimentality — or so I tell myself — but this chorus has been on my mind repeatedly over the last few days.
The temptation, for a Christian, for the Church, is to rush with an answer to Tom’s question, Why wasn’t God there?
It occurs to me that perhaps most of our (the Church’s) answers to that question just haven’t been very good.
That is, they may have been theologically sound… but that’s perhaps about all they were.
Further, I would hazard a guess that this question, in some form or another, is one of the major questions unbelievers are going to have when conversing about the gospel. I have absolutely zero statistics or research about that, but I might even guess that this question, at least in cultures with a Christian heritage, such as North America, is possibly the major question that people have about God… and that our answers to it have evidently not been very satisfactory.
This could imply that without a “satisfactory” answer to this type of question — Where was God when…? — well, a lot of evangelistic efforts are going to continue to fall flat.
On the other hand, that might be the problem. Maybe the problem is that we keep trying to respond to this question with a clear cut, definitive answer. There’s something about giving a calm, rational set of reasons for the continued existence of rape, murder, debilitating disease, poverty, starvation, and death, that just doesn’t sound very compassionate. I mean, trying to answer the question could almost come across as saying, You see? It’s okay that these things are happening. Everything is fine!
So here’s a modest proposal: maybe, just maybe, when faced with the questions Why wasn’t God watching? Why wasn’t God listening? Why wasn’t God there?… maybe we should just say we don’t know. Because no matter how airtight your theology, ultimately we don’t know why a particular event happens at a certain time to any given persons… However, we’re here… we can listen. We can be there.
Zig Ziglar used to say in his sales & motivation material that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” That’s about as corny as it gets, but there’s still some “truthiness” to it. Perhaps in trying so hard to explain where God is while bad things are happening in the world, we’ve been trying so hard to show the world what we know about God, that they can’t see that He cares.
Just some thoughts… beyond that, I guess I don’t know.
Very helpful comments. I’ve only recently discovered Tom Waits and Georgia Lee is my favourite (yes, I’m a Brit). I agree that any attempts at theodicy can sound either feeble or callous in the face of the death of a child. There has been much publicity in Britain over the disappearance of a three-year-old last week while on holiday with her parents in Portugal. Madeleine is blonde and her parents are both doctors. One can’t help wondering whether this would have received so much publicity if Madeleine was black and her mother was a single parent addict.
Paul Fiddes, in his book ‘Past Event, Present Salvation’, quotes from Eli Wiesel’ book ‘Night’ in which a Jewish child is hanged in a concentration camp during WWII. An on-looker asks, bitterly, ‘where is your God?’. Another answers ‘there, on the gallows’. The implication is that God is dead, but Fiddes argues that this second comment points us to Jesus on the cross: God is in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.
I believe this to be true, but I also find it helpful when Christians admit the limits of their certainty, while rolling uo their sleeves and getting down to the business of sharing in God’s mission to the world.
Thanks for the comment, Simon; the book by Fiddes sounds interesting, I’ll have to look for it.
It’s a tough thing, to admit uncertainty, especially in certain circles of the church that I’ve been used to hanging out in. There’s certain things about which we ought to be certain, but not to the point of being obnoxious or having no empathy… maybe that’s the difficult part.
Also, if we have a pat answer for everything, it’s very easy to ignore the tough, messy questions, and to avoid rolling up the sleeves, as you say.
Grace & Peace!