On the Sundays before and after Christmas, Fayetteville Friends Meeting is having a program that, on the surface, appears decidedly non-Christmas-y. It is a two part "Worship Sharing," a heart-to-heart Friends' dialog, about the intersection of Holocaust horrors and other human-made atrocities, poetry and prayer. We ask ourselves, "Why did God not intervene in the Holocaust or answer the prayers of those being tortured and murdered? What is prayer? And who or what is God? Can the art of creating poetry or any art, tell us something about the nature of God?"
As a springboard for our discussion, we read (through tears) three Holocaust poems by William Heyen. Here is one:
I became further fixated on the subject of "God and evil," as a 16-year-old when I read Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. Then, in yet another twist of irony (or fate), I fell in love with and married a man who is Jewish and therefore understandably purturbed by the Holocaust. Stanley grew up in the late 1940s and early 1950s in a southside Chicago, a Jewish neighborhood where he encountered survivors who not only bore tattooed camp numbers on their arms, but tattooed traumas on their brains and nervous systems, some more resilient than others.
Theodicy is defined as "a defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in the face of the existence of evil." Like the word " theodicy" itself, I cannot read this definition or read any argument in defense of a God who could stop evil but won't, without odd voices popping up in my head. In my mind's ear, I hear Homer Simpson asking, "Could God create a burrito so hot that he, himself, could not eat it?"
The two leaders of the Worship Sharing, both with the first name, "Peter," are, in some ways, an unlikely duo. One is a self proclaimed "Agnostic-Jewish-Quaker," a retired, 80-year-old, Professor of English and author; the other is retired United Methodist minister, in the midst of a "midlife surge," who is open to other vocations (but not another spiritual path than his beloved Christianity).
The two Peters are not giving us any answers, of course, to this thorny question.They can only show us how they have, like Jacob, wrestled with God, got scarred, but kept on facing all that is thrown at them by life, not flinching, but living to tell the story of What was encountered. Besides, getting pat answers or creedal statements are not the purpose of Worship Sharing. Our goal there is to encounter one another and be guided by the Inner Light in such a way that we live better lives, ones in harmony with Friends Testimonies: simplicity, peace, community and equality.
In Meeting for Worship on Sunday, I had the repetative thought, "None of us will ever answer the theodicy riddle." But then I heard bird trilling in the winter chill outside our meeting space window, and it came to me that another poet, Maya Angelou, came pretty close.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
As a springboard for our discussion, we read (through tears) three Holocaust poems by William Heyen. Here is one:
- Catbird
- Another thick book of testimonies—
- I knew I could not remember them all.
- It was as though the survivors
- were moving past me in a line,
- & I were choosing among them:
- that way to oblivion, this way
- into a poem with my rhythmic baton.
- But this spring morning a catbird sang
- outside my door while I was reading,
while Rabbi Solomon H. remembered his son, - a nine-year-old who had,
- Solomon tells us,
- half the book of Psalms by heart.
- When he was taken to be murdered,
- he was saying the Psalms from memory.
- Just before being gassed, the boy said,
- "I am still going to pray to God.
- Maybe at the last moment we will still be saved,'
- & I looked up,
- &, as catbirds will, this one
- kept singing like crazy, its song
- losing track of its beginning,
- never the melodies of final meanings,
- but going on as though nothing
- within its own singing
- could ever not remember
- everything.
- Friends are addressing, in part, theodicy a word I can never read without a kind of dyslexia. I read it as "idiocy." Immediately, I experience the irony of mixing the two, theodicy with idiocy. It is a bit idiotic, I suppose, to try to understand the impossible and ineffable, especially as it relates to something as painful and perplexing as human evil.
I became further fixated on the subject of "God and evil," as a 16-year-old when I read Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. Then, in yet another twist of irony (or fate), I fell in love with and married a man who is Jewish and therefore understandably purturbed by the Holocaust. Stanley grew up in the late 1940s and early 1950s in a southside Chicago, a Jewish neighborhood where he encountered survivors who not only bore tattooed camp numbers on their arms, but tattooed traumas on their brains and nervous systems, some more resilient than others.
Theodicy is defined as "a defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in the face of the existence of evil." Like the word " theodicy" itself, I cannot read this definition or read any argument in defense of a God who could stop evil but won't, without odd voices popping up in my head. In my mind's ear, I hear Homer Simpson asking, "Could God create a burrito so hot that he, himself, could not eat it?"
The two leaders of the Worship Sharing, both with the first name, "Peter," are, in some ways, an unlikely duo. One is a self proclaimed "Agnostic-Jewish-Quaker," a retired, 80-year-old, Professor of English and author; the other is retired United Methodist minister, in the midst of a "midlife surge," who is open to other vocations (but not another spiritual path than his beloved Christianity).
The two Peters are not giving us any answers, of course, to this thorny question.They can only show us how they have, like Jacob, wrestled with God, got scarred, but kept on facing all that is thrown at them by life, not flinching, but living to tell the story of What was encountered. Besides, getting pat answers or creedal statements are not the purpose of Worship Sharing. Our goal there is to encounter one another and be guided by the Inner Light in such a way that we live better lives, ones in harmony with Friends Testimonies: simplicity, peace, community and equality.
In Meeting for Worship on Sunday, I had the repetative thought, "None of us will ever answer the theodicy riddle." But then I heard bird trilling in the winter chill outside our meeting space window, and it came to me that another poet, Maya Angelou, came pretty close.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
A free bird leaps on the back of the wind
and floats downstream till the current ends
and dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage
can seldom see through his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
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