Using God to Shame and Blame

I learned recently that my old high school has had 3 students die unexpectedly this year.  One was found hanged.  One jumped off a garage.  One "died unexpectedly."  All were athletes.  After reading about this disturbing news, I saw some of the comments attached to the post.  There were a string of comments about "This is why we need God back in our schools."  I was beyond puzzled by this line of thinking.  Would you say this to the families of the kids who are dead?  "If you had God in your lives, this wouldn't have happened."  This response makes me angry.  It is a callous response.  It is a self-righteous response.  It is a response devoid of love, compassion, empathy.  How in the name of all that is holy could this ever be considered a Godly response?

In a way, this is the Christian spin on the destructive thinking espoused by Deepak Chopra's THE SECRET.  "If you visualize positive outcomes and you think positively, good things will happen to you."  The corollary, of course, is that if bad things happen to you, it's your fault.  It's because you weren't positive enough, you didn't visualize enough, you weren't Godly enough.

Step into reality.  Bad things sometimes happen to good people.  That fact is probably one of the greatest stumbling blocks on the road towards faith.  To deny that fact, or imply that the answer is simply that those people weren't good enough or faithful enough, is beyond offensive.  It is cruel and hurtful and just plain false.

Who are we to measure what constitutes the right amount and form of God in our schools or anywhere else?  What makes us think we are so powerful that we can control our world through our prayers or thoughts?  We can't.  There is a great deal in this world beyond our control.  Recognizing that fact requires humility.  True humility.  The same humility that is required to accept that some aspects of God are unknowable from the vantage point of human life on earth.

What Makes God Laugh?

My last post, and the quote it triggered for me, got me thinking about this question.  'Cause, like I said, I find it hard to believe God would sit there laughing at all us poor schlubs just because once in a while we need to labor under the delusion that we have control over our fates.  I just don't want to think God is that spiteful, that mean-spirited.  Maybe it's a gentle sort of laugh.

On the other hand, we really ought to imagine God laughing more often.  The Bible says, "He who sits in the heavens laughs."  But there's not much in the Bible to tell us what makes God laugh.  If we're made in God's image, maybe we have to look to ourselves to see what makes God laugh.

Laughter definitely feels heaven-sent to me.  Some of the most joyful times I've ever spent were those where I laughed the evening away over the freewheeling exchange of thoughts and comments and ideas that somehow sent me into big, beautiful belly chortles, though I honestly think any individual item that set me off, removed from the context of love and friendship in which it was born, just wouldn't seem as funny.

The best laughter grows and builds from shared awareness of our own foibles, our common humanity.  It feels freest, most holy, if you'll pardon the use of that word, when it represents our own ability to laugh at ourselves, when it is born from an ineffable soil of humility and empathy.

Unfortunately, like so many human gifts, sometimes we use laughter for good and sometimes for harm.  When laughter is driven by cruelty, by the desire to exclude, by envy and the mean-spirited wish to make ourselves seem more important at the expense of someone else's dignity, it is an ugly and harmful thing.  A lot of social bullying in elementary school feeds on this kind of laughter.  Sometimes we laugh at things that make us uncomfortable, like we just don't know how else to respond.  There's an anxiety and uncertainty to that kind of laughter that lacks the strength to build into joyful rolling waves.

I'd like to believe that when God laughs, He is laughing with us instead of laughing at us.    But if God is completely removed from us, superior to us, how can we believe that he laughs with us?  This is where the Christian belief that God became human comes in handy.  If God has truly and completely experienced what it is to be human, then he can laugh with us, from that place of empathy that drives the best of laughter.

So what makes God laugh?  I'd like to think God gets a good laugh out of some of those goofy, halfway jokes that third graders tell, you know, the ones that represent kids' early explorations of their own sense of humor.  And I'd like to think God gets a good laugh out of watching us laugh, 'cause we all know laughter is contagious.

Now I'm back at that quote that started me down this road:  "Man plans and God laughs."  Can that possibly be a laughter of empathy?  When I think about it, I believe it can be.  After all, surely God's plans don't always go the way he wants.  Look at the story of Adam and Eve.  Free will makes it a given that God's plans may not go the way he thought.  Maybe he looks back on some of those moments, in the hindsight of eternity, and laughs.  At the very least, this experience means that he can laugh in empathy when things don't go our way.  He can laugh and say "I've been there, my friend."

I wonder what it looks and sounds like when God laughs.  If God is in all of us, then maybe, when we laugh, it is really God laughing.  When I hear my students laugh, perhaps I should say to myself, "There goes God, cracking himself up again."