Most of my twitter feed is pretty left leaning, lots of comedians and otherwise funny people. It's made up of people that make me laugh and people I think are like me. When something terrible happens, the posts get weird. The Batman theatre shooting, hurricane Sandy and now the school shooting in Connecticut. Otherwise jovial smart-asses get serious and try to deal with their hurt and fear and sense of injustice over the twitter waves. A lot of it is good. Most frequently it is about gun control and as the right leaning folks respond to the left leaning folks, that is all it becomes about and pretty soon good minded people are taking political positions over the dead bodies of children. Better gun control seems reasonable to me as a reaction. However, to pretend that is a solution seems pretty naive.
What is not dealt with is a fundamental broken-ness in all of us. As many good minded people deal with the insane hurt they feel, does anyone stop to wonder where this fierce sense of justice comes from? Why is the slaughter of the innocent such and overwhelming blow? We seem to talk about these issues while only dealing with the pure emotions and the surface reasoning. In a world without God, these random acts fit into the "order" of things, trucking right along with the random "order" of Natural Selection and Evolution. Time+Matter+Chance. Is Justice then just a protective reaction that has developed over the course of evolution. That is plausible, I can't deny that. What I can't shake, as I consider my God in the world of the Godless is that I am even able to consider it at all. If we accept that there is no God, then we are left to make sense of this on our own. We are smart and we will come up with increasingly clever reasons for the way we feel. The problem is that we are perpetually a part of the experiment. To deny God as a possibility in the name of Science is to corrupt the scientific process, because we will never be able to remove ourselves far enough to see what is really there. We will ALWAYS demand a solution, and our efforts to search for those solutions will be tainted by our beliefs and emotions. Only in God do we find a pure starting point for our emotions. There is Truth, and if we start there we are free to roam in sensible directions looking for answers instead of scattering ourselves across the great breadth of knowledge looking for patterns in Time+Matter+Chance. That leaves us hollow. These great tradgedies will continue to occur and we are left with only ourselves and our wit to try and explain why and how to our children.
So if God is real and a real part of the equation, what then? This tradgedy is no less awful. In fact, for some it becomes even more awful. How could God let this happen? What kind of twisted God are we dealing with? The answer lies in our own broken-ness. This world contains glimpses of Heaven and glimpses of Hell and we all live right there in the tension. It seem that we can't quite shake the feeling of God and we can't escape Hell on Earth. The mercy of God is explained in the fact that we are allowed to exist at all: you , me and the mass murderers. We are all allowed to live in this world. The weeds grow and thrive right along with the beauty of the field, but there will be a harvest and the beauty will remain forever and the scourge with be burned forever. If the world were only filled with beauty, then we would already be in Heaven. We all know that that is not the case. So in times like this, God is the only thing that makes sense. Our fierce sense of Justice burns. It burns because we are made in his image and he is Love and Justice and Mercy. We want justice now, but because of our less Godly attributes, our fleshy human sense of right and wrong we have no way of administering or sustaining Justice. We know this in history, we will mess it up. We mess it up because we can't shake our own flaws and broken jealousies and lustful vengence. The shooter is dead and no one feels better about it. If he were alive and tortured, that still wouldn't do the trick. The only Hope that remains is that God will make all things right, that the wicked will get what they deserve and that the wounds of the believers will be healed and the tears of the innocent will be wiped away. Here and now we live in that Hope, and we try to restore our world in the little ways that we can, because we are like him. Even as our world hurdles through this entropic path of pain, we will continue to hope and love because we are like him. And in the end the Love you recieve will not be equal to the Love you gave. In the ultimate sacrificial display, God gives all. We get to call on his name and be saved. That may not seem like Justice, but that is because it is a Justice we cannot comprehend. It's a Love that overwhelms all. We just surrender to the name of God: Jesus and we will receive his Love forever. It is a love a million times greater than we even catch a glimpse if here. God is Love, and this pain doesn't make sense without him.
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