A Sort of Mendacious Conversation

I was talking to God the other day, just having a quiet little conversation. I talk with God a lot, mostly about my problems. He doesn't mind, so long as I try to keep it interesting. Some­times he even calls me up just so he'll have someone to talk with. We get to know one another better that way, talking the way we do.

You take the other day: I was feeling pretty much down. My dog had died and I had a toothache. When I went out in the field to dig a grave for Jeff - the tooth pounding - I looked up and hol­lered at God. "Hey!" I shouted. "This is no way to treat a friend!" He looked up from his workbench and winked. "Would you rather the dog be digging a grave for you?" At first, I thought that was the cruelest thing I'd ever heard. It seemed God had no care for my beloved Jeff. But then I got to thinking about it. Jeff and I both have got to die sometime, and I could just see old Jeff there, maybe with a toothache himself, scratching out a hole for me in the ground. He would cry his eyes out. I know he would. That little guy's heart would be broken because I know, you see, Jeff loved me more than I loved him. You could tell by the way he acted. I remember the time he accident­al­ly bit my thumb. Oh, what a look of shame came upon that beau­t­i­ful little face! "What have I done," he was say­ing. "What in the name of heaven have I done, biting the hand of the person I love most in the world." And I knew, you see, just thinking about how Jeff felt, I knew what God meant. He meant Jeff dying instead of me, in just that order, was the right order. Any other way and the amount of pain in the world would have been greater.

I understood all that just from that one little exchange with God. That's what I meant when I said talking to God helps clear things up.

This thing with Jeff dying brings up something I hadn't thought of until now. You hear people talk a lot about provi­dence, particu­larly divine providence. Mostly, the talk is crit­ical of the whole notion. People these days don't much believe in it. But when you sniff around that talk I had with God about Jeff's death, you can't help but catch a whiff of divine provi­dence. Somebody minimizing the amount of pain in the world sounds like something that wouldn't happen the way it did without some higher power figuring it all out in advance, weighing one order of our dying against the other, and deciding to do it the way it happened. But that kind of thinking is what has led so many people to doubt the hand of providence. It's hard for people brought up on flesh-and-blood logical reasoning to put any real faith in something as far fetched as a divine power in the sky arranging matters on a little fly speck of a planet whirling around one of the billions of stars in a remote corner of one of the billions of galaxies. Belief in that sort of thing has pretty much gone South.

Maybe we've been looking at it wrong. Maybe we've been thinking too literally about the notion of providence. Take a look at what God actually said to me (after I'd chewed him out about killing my dog). God didn't say anything about balancing out the pain in the world. He only asked me if I'd be more satisfied having Jeff bury me instead of the other way around. It was me who came up with the part about minimizing pain. Maybe the way God has set it up includes some sort of a built in providence, something no one would notice at a glance but which begins to make sense if you look long enough. The idea that Jeff's dying before me had some­how been for the best didn't occur to some airy-fairy, vaporous ghost. It occurred to me; it happened in my mind - and my mind, however it came to be what it is, is a part of the whole thing most people give God credit for creating.

Of course, the bit about "creating" is probably just as hard for modern people to accept as the notion of divine providence, so I don't want to get caught up in that one. I'm just talking here about what happened when I got angry with God about my dog dying, and about the thought that occurred to me after God put his spin on the situation. And as you can see (from the trouble I'm having putting it into words) I'm not altogether clear about everything that's wrapped up in that thought. But here's my first real at­tempt to make sense of it. It's a kind of analogy.

Imagine a master sculptor who's trying to instruct a bunch of wannabees who never sculpted anything in their lives. The master - because he is a genuine master - decides to forget about teaching the rules of sculpting. He has figured it out for himself that his notions about what makes a piece of sculpture good are limited by his ideas and his experience as a sculp­tor. So instead of telling his apprentices what good sculpture ought to look like, he just throws each of the them a hunk of clay or stone or wood or whatever and then just walks off and leaves the novices to figure the rest out for them­selves. After that, whatever the students do with the materials is going to be exactly what the master intended, because what he intended for them to do was whatever they learned to do. In other words, whatever happened could be said to be "divine providence."

Now I realize this doesn't jibe with what a lot of people think of as divine providence, but as I said, a lot of people are having a terrible time coming to grips with the orthodox notion. In offer­ing an alternative, I'm doing nothing but trying to hold onto some form of belief in providence so I'll have a way to explain an even bigger mystery (which maybe I'll get to later, soon as my cat dies). Those who still think of providence in the conventional way would have the master sculptor taking a look at every piece of claptrap the students make, putting a stamp of approval on some and discarding others. They think for divine providence to have any real meaning, God has to be involved in the details of the world, like making day-to-day judgments about what's good sculp­ture and what's not, what's right and what's wrong. But that idea of providence has always run into severe difficulty because the same people who hold to that belief also believe that God is permanently and completely benevolent, that is, that he's a good guy. But you don't have to look too hard to see that some of the things God would have "discarded" don't resemble the actions of a good guy. My dog, for example, was only 14 months old and never did any real harm in the world, to himself or anyone else. (My thumb stopped hurting in less than a minute.)

It's not that clever thinkers can't come up with explana­tions for the apparent contradictions between abso­lute divine providence and absolute benevolence. It's just that some of the clever twists they've had to put on things in order to resolve the problems have made keeping the faith awfully difficult.

By at­tributing real di­vine power to God, by saying right up front that it was his idea all along to let his apprentices work out their own solutions to the problems they face in trying to sculpt a livable world, God exhibited a lot more sense than he would have by creating a world that required His full attention all the time.

Of course, doing it this way, letting the pupils learn for them­selves, you're bound to get a lot of bad art. But also, when you finally get something worth keeping, there won't be any doubt about the goodness of it. You won't have to wonder whether God approves, or even if you're asking the right God. He'll approve because all he ever wanted was for the sculptor who made the thing to be satisfied. And it won't really matter if you've got the right God tuned in. The only thing he's going to say anyhow is, "Attaboy! Stay with it!" just like any real Master worthy of the name would do.

That works for me. I may not be doing too good at making a world that works, but at least I know not to blame God. Two bits says that if God were judge and jury of every human act, the world would be littered even more than it is with the remains of reject­ed art. Then it would matter that we identify the right God. Some Gods may have different ideas about what makes a world good.

Of course, human beings might disagree about that, too. But maybe we can eventually get rid of the notion that the rules for sculpture are divinely inspired. When we do, we'll find it easier to change our minds. Maybe the only rule is that we do our best at sculpting.

Just as I completed that thought, I laid little Jeff in his grave. He looked up at me for the last time. I know he didn't actually smile, but I thought he did.