The Roots of Religion
When Answering “Why?” is the Wrong Question
by Kathy Sharp
A few years ago, at a meeting of interfaith clergy from The Center for Ecumenical and Interfaith Engagement at Seattle University, a hospital chaplain shared how her patients often get stuck trying to understand why a frightening disease or injury came to them or their loved ones. WHY is this happening to me? To the person I love? They cried out for justice. Why would God make or let this happen?
As an ordained Protestant hospital chaplain, her patients come from many faiths and no faith seeking spiritual comfort and she wanted guidance on how to help them move past these questions in the midst of the most difficult moments of their lives.
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A Buddhist member of our advisory council spoke up quickly. “That’s never a problem in Buddhism. We don’t believe in deities that control our lives. We don’t spend time in the ‘Why?’” Instead we face the reality of the suffering in front of us and ask ourselves what is our compassionate response.
My eyes widened as the chaplain and I exchanged surprised looks. This Buddhist perspective opened our Christian eyes to how different our faith is on this point.
Christians can get tangled in guilt, confusion, unfairness, or resentment when they assume that God is a powerful puppeteer and in control of every detail of everyone’s lives. When individuals suffer, some faithful Christians unhelpfully try to defend God’s hand in it. Indeed, the perplexing question of theodicy – how a loving and all-powerful God can allow evil and suffering in the world – has never been satisfactorily resolved. And so, faithful Christians searching to bring comfort to their friends in the midst of trauma, try to explain or justify suffering as God’s will or part of an inscrutable divine plan that will turn out well in the end: perhaps after we die, when we will better understand God’s perfect purposes in our lives. Unfortunately, this kind of explanation is often more damaging than helpful.
When a Child Dies
As a young mother in the 1980s, I was the recipient of such cold comfort from a much respected, generous female lay minister in my denomination, Community of Christ. My husband and two young daughters (ages 6 and 18 months) had moved from Puerto Rico to the Pacific Northwest while I was six months pregnant with our third child. But on the first appointment with my new OB/GYN doctor, I learned that my baby had died, inexplicably, in the womb. No scientific cause ever was determined, even after delivery.
When I first learned the news of my baby’s death, I asked my mother to buy me the popular new book by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Rabbi Kushner confronted the question of God’s power and will when his young son was diagnosed with progeria. Progeria is a rare disease that causes a child to rapidly age and die young. Kushner asked how God allows innocent lives to suffer. Why doesn’t an omnipotent God use their power to prevent or heal disease?
Photo: Niszczyciel-ART, DeviantArt
While waiting for the scheduled delivery of my deceased child, I consumed Kushner’s book to see if his conclusions could frame for me a loving relationship with God through my own agonizing loss. I knew that feeling separated from God through anger would only make my sorrow more isolating. Rabbi Kushner described an alternative image of God, a God who weeps with you as you weep for the suffering or loss of your loved one. This God Who Weeps neither intended nor caused my child to suffer. This death of my child was not occurring as a character-building experience. Rabbi Kushner’s gentle reframing of God’s presence within our sorrow became the armor shielding me from questioning God, self-blame, fear, and bitterness.
The shield of a sympathetic, rather than a manipulative, God protected me when a well-meaning, well-respected older woman in my faith community attempted to comfort me by offering an explanation to why my baby in the womb had died.
“Maybe God was trying to tell you that you couldn’t handle your toddler and this baby, so God took the baby.”
Her fumbling attempts to make my deceased baby part of God’s design felt like a sharp slap in my face. An insult to me, my toddler, and to God. Thanks to Kushner’s book, I was able to deflect her comment. Still, decades later I remember the horror of it. I tried to integrate this lesson when friends and family experienced devastation in their lives. Be present, but slow to speak. Express your sadness for them and find ways to help. Resist inserting God’s purposes, blaming the victim, or inventing meaning or purpose to the tragedy. Telling the victim they must have caused it or that God willed it is arrogant and hurtful.
An Ancient Jewish Text Offers Insights on Trauma Response
The ancient Book of Job from the Hebrew Bible teaches us how to be a friend when someone is in the midst of tragedy. Several scriptures in the Hebrew Bible stressed following God’s instruction for a righteous, happy, prosperous life. Today this idea is popularly preached as “the prosperity gospel.” The implied corollary is that suffering is caused by sin and lack of faithful devotion.
Refuting the prosperity gospel is the story of Job. Job was a righteous, generous, respected, and prosperous man. He was devoted and grateful to his God. As his story begins, Job and his wife had sons and daughters, donkeys, camels, sheep, oxen and many servants. One day a series of disasters occur and all their children, servants, and animals were killed or stolen. Job’s faith and stoicism are unshakeable as he proclaims, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. (NRSV, Job 1: 21b).
Job lost everything and refused to blame God. His breaking point came when his entire body was “inflicted with loathsome sores, from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” (Job 2:7-8) Job was in such agony that he used a piece of broken pottery to scrape his sores, and sat among the ashes. His wife suggested Job curse God and die.
Photo: BiblePics
At this point, three friends from different villages heard of Job’s troubles and came to see him. To their credit, they offered a silent ministry of presence, sitting beside him in the ashes without speaking for seven days and seven nights. But the real trouble starts when each of the friends decides to speak. At length. Each tries to convince Job that he must have sinned for these trials to come upon him. They tried to justify God’s involvement in his sorrows, as if they knew the mind of God. Job despairs as he defends his innocence, laments God’s absence, and rejects the shallow and arrogant “wisdom” each of his friends insists on offering. What if instead they had looked at the reality of Job’s situation and searched for a compassionate response?
When the final friend concludes his oratory, God enters the conversation, reminding Job of God’s awesome creative power and dominion in the universes. Unlike the three “wise” friends, God does not explain or justify why Job’s life was now miserable. In fact, God tells Job to teach his friends the error of their shallow thinking.
After personally experiencing the majesty of God, Job addresses God and admits his own understanding of God was inadequate:
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. . .
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees you:
Therefore I despise myself,
And repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:3b, 5-6)
The story of Job never does attribute Job’s sinfulness as the cause of his many disasters. The question of “Why?” is never resolved. Instead, God insists that the three friends be corrected for telling Job that he was at fault. Happily, God restores and doubles all that Job lost.
In Contemporary Disasters, Waiting to Assert Why
We might read Job’s story as a fable, but the scale of Job’s disasters – both natural and manmade – are very like what we’ve seen in the United States recently. Hurricanes Katrina, Helene, Idalia, Beryl and Helene overwhelmed communities up and down the Gulf Coast, East Coast, and the interior of North Carolina. Americans watched in horror and sympathy, and for these disasters political leaders offered compassion, hope and help.
Photo: FMT
Multiple uncontrollable and simultaneous wildfires surrounded cities near Los Angeles, California this past January, revealing how vulnerable we are to the forces of nature. Within a day, residents lost their homes, personal possessions, and automobiles. Relatives, neighbors and cherished animals were missing or dead. Their towns were completely gone. Many had no means to start over and no assurance their losses would be compensated. Though Americans responded to this disaster, President Trump at this writing is still withholding federal disaster aid unless he receives a political concession from the state. So eager to answer why the fires occurred, he blamed the State of California for mismanaging their forests.
January’s tragic passenger plane and military helicopter collision in Washington, D.C., followed by the small plane crashing in a Philadelphia suburb, again required time for shock and mourning. The nation was filled with empathy as they waited to see who was killed. Long before the bodies of passengers and crew were recovered from the passenger jet, President Trump, blamed the first crash on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs rather than offering sincere compassion to those who had lost loved ones.
Being present and silent among people caught in the midst of trauma would have been a better fit in the moment.
Interfaith Friendships during a Controversial War
As a new member of the National Council of the Churches in Christ in the USA (NCC) and the National Council of Synagogues Jewish/Christian dialogue table, I learned the nuances of silence and listening at my first meeting with a long-established group. The June 24, 2024, dialogue group had already met once after the October 7th brutal Hamas attack and kidnappings in Israel. Eight months and many fatalities later (in Israel, and overwhelmingly in Gaza), the Jewish clergy were still freshly traumatized by the attack. One rabbi explained to me the close personal connections that exist between Jewish Americans and Israelis. She said most American Jews knew someone or many who were impacted by the attack. An attack on Israel was viscerally a direct, traumatic attack on them.
Much like Job’s disappointing experience with his friends, who piled onto the trauma of his circumstances, many American Jews found themselves friendless and isolated from their Christian friends. I asked the rabbis in my small group what had we Christians done or not done.
For many years, various Christian denominations and organizations had condemned the government of Israel for its brutal treatment of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. But in this case, and for this rabbi, the hurt came when her Christian friends did not immediately reach out to her after October 7th. She wanted them to acknowledge her personal pain, as Job’s three friends did initially.
I was, and am, horrified by the subsequent disproportionate killings of women and children in Gaza and destruction of housing, hospitals, schools and infrastructure. This dialogue was not brought together to assert the causes and aftermath of the current war. Instead, following the modeling of experienced dialogue partners in the room, I listened. I heard the personal stories and contexts of two American Jews that were raised as Zionists. I heard the perspectives of Palestine Christians, caught up in perpetual violence between Israel’s Jewish population and Muslim Palestinians. The Christian clergy present were silent, open, and avoided accusations of why the Middle East was unstable and violent.
As dialogue partners from different faith perspectives, we suspended the trap of “Why” and instead imitated the Buddhist practice of asking first, “How can I be compassionate to this faith group in the midst of trauma?”
Header Photo: Pexels