We Weren't Blessed: Reflections on the Stillwater Homecoming Tragedy

My daughter's friend, the tiniest girl on her gymnastics team, asked the question: "Why wasn't God at the parade?"

Let's not hide from this question.

I was at the parade. I stood with my family outside the Hastings store, yards from where the car would crash into the crowd at 50 miles an hour. My daughter and her gymnastics team had just gone by in their float, and I was running an errand to the van, which was just around the corner, to collect my wife's purse and my mother-in-law's keys.

When I came back moments later, the world had been transformed.

I looked at the chaos, heard the sobbing.

Something terrible has happened.

The kind of terrible that shatters lives. The kind of terrible that inspires children raised with a simple faith to see a world transformed. A world hollowed out. A world without God.

I was there. But on that bleak October morning, standing under a slate-gray sky with my wife's purse clutched in my fist, I felt the desolation that a child would later put into worlds. I was there. But God?

My son was there. When I dashed off to the van , he stood with my wife and his Grandma, watching the tail-end of the parade. He heard the explosive crash. He saw things flying into the air. He heard the screams. His ears, if not his eyes, witnessed death.

He ran. "I was sure," he told me later, "that someone had set off a bomb,"

My wife was there. When the horror struck, her thoughts flew to our daughter, whose float had gone by moments before. Reason told her the float was already well clear of the intersection, but once she saw that her son was safe, her mother's instincts urged her to reach the other child.

Doing so took her right through the carnage. When she called to say our daughter was safe, she sobbed into the phone: "Don't let him see! Don't let him see."

My mother-in law was there. She knelt with a weeping young woman who had been a few yards closer than us, and so had an unobstructed view of that moment that divided life and death, that tore into human flesh, that shattered lives. My mother-in-law asked the girl if she wanted to pray with her. She said yes. And so, while chaos swirled, they prayed.

One of my graduate students was there with his wife and young daughter. He'd stepped over to the stroller to get something, which brought him just far enough away to avoid injury when the car struck. His wife was treated and released. His daughter was hospitalized but will recover.

My son's classmate was there--a friend he's known since preschool. The careening car clipped him just before crashing into a pole. He was rushed to the hospital in the bed of Pistol Pete' pickup truck.

A theatre friend and her sister were there. Both hospitalized but recovering. The man my kids call Coach--their camp counselor and a former colleague of my wife--was there with his two small children. He suffered minor injuries. His children were hospitalized but are expected to be fine.

Others were less lucky. Nikita Nabal, a young woman from Mumbai, India pursuing her master's degree here in Oklahoma, was there. Bonnie and Marvyn Stone, 65 years old, were there. Lucas Nash, a two-year-old boy, was there. And because they were there, standing where they were, they're gone. Their loved ones now look at an emptier world, a world hollowed out.

And I think about what my daughter's little friend saw, trembling on the float as chaos reigned: A world hollowed out. A world without God.

So many were there, people I knew and people I didn't know. It was a family event. A tradition. A connection to a time before people's noses were buried in cell phones, a time when children looked out at the world and pointed at the wonders going by instead of fixing their gazes on a screen.

So many were there. But God?

"Why wasn't God at the parade?"

Let us, as people of faith, begin with that. When we confront horrors, let us begin with what my daughter's friend saw in the aftermath of the tragedy: A world hollowed out. A world without God.

Jesus praised the faith of children. He said that the Kingdom of God belongs to those with a child's faith. And when a child of faith looked out across what happened in Stillwater, OK, on that Saturday morning, what did she see?

Let us begin there. Let us begin with a child's shaken faith, because any other starting place leads to platitudes that don't do justice to the horror. Let us start with God's absence.

Let us remember that this little child's question is the same as the one that Jesus asked when he was nailed to a cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

A world hollowed out. A world without God. If anyone suggests that it is blasphemy to begin there, then they accuse Jesus of blasphemy. To hide from that starting point is to refuse to pick up our crosses and follow Him.

I waited out the tragedy's aftermath with my family in a coffee shop. We sat at a wooden table, stuttering out our first reactions to what had happened. Someone said we were lucky. Another said we were blessed.

"No. Don't say that. We weren't blessed."

"But that's exactly what we were."

"No. If we were blessed, then what about those who were hit? To say we were blessed is to say that God skipped over them."

"That's not what I meant. No, of course. I didn't mean that."

Silence at the table. The specter of survivor's guilt.

And the questions. How can we see God at the parade unless we see God playing favorites? How could God have been there in all the trappings of almighty power, unless God was protecting some and cursing others?

But what's the alternative to a God who plays favorites? If God does not play favorites, does that mean the toddler who died was blessed? That his mother was blessed? Dare we trivialize the horror? Dare we pretend that their world was anything less than hollowed out?

Maybe our God is a quadriplegic God, a God who cannot act in the world without borrowing others' hands. Maybe nature's laws are something God has set up as a kind of wall between Himself and the world, a wall he dare not shatter on pain of swamping finite reality with the vastness of its infinite creator. Maybe creation was an act of withdrawal, and necessarily so.

Maybe there is no God.

Maybe. Maybe.

My own faith has been shaped in part by the maybes of a Jewish/Marxist mystic philosopher named Simone Weil, who appropriated Christian ideas from her friend Father Perrin, a Catholic priest who begged her without success to convert to Christianity. Instead, she handed back to him his Christian faith transformed by the perspective of an outsider.

And what did she find in the story of Jesus' crucifixion? A God who crosses the infinite distance of time and space to inhabit that place where we can never go--that place where God is wholly absent. God at God's most human is there--paradoxically, impossibly there.

What Simone Weil saw in the Christian story was a God who cast off the trappings of infinite glory to inhabit that place in creation where God is missing, to step into that space of horror and desolation, and to cry out with all of us, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Each of us brushes up against that place of absence. We are there, but God is not. It is a place where, in the ordinary sense of blessings, there are none. There is only good luck and bad. There is only the blind grinding of nature's laws, chewing out its victims one by one while others huddle in witness, grateful that they haven't been taken yet but sure that their time, too, will come.

It would be an assault on the concept of divine love to say that God blessed me by sending me on an errand at the crucial moment, so that I wouldn't have to hear the horrible sounds of death that my son clearly heard. It would be an assault on the concept of divine love to say that God blessed my graduate student by inspiring him to step towards the stroller and so out of the path of injury that his wife and child still fell within. A God who reaches down to spare my life but not the lives of others isn't the kind of God whose blessing we can cling to without a darkening of our souls.

To live in a world where God is hidden, where mechanistic laws and chance routinely strike down the good and lift up the wicked, blindly indifferent to anyone's worth--this is a reality we must recognize, despite our wish-thinking, despite the promises of prosperity preaching that offers us visions of terrestrial blessings if only we agree to ignore the plight of the poor and the sick (or say it's their own fault).

But there is the blessing of solidarity. There is the blessing of the one who sits and cries with us in the silence and the dark.

And there is the blessing of those who are urged by the voice of conscience, or perhaps the voice of God, to run to the aid of those in need, to nurture and care for the wounded, to grieve with those who mourn.

We need to begin with God's absence. We must affirm that a world of blind mechanism and chance combines with the darkest parts of our human wills to produce horrors. Horrors that can strike into the heart of innocent family pleasures. Horrors that can shatter the laughter of a parade even as children are pointing joyfully towards what's coming next. We need to admit that God isn't scurrying around shielding some from harm while letting others fall.

But we don't need to stop there. Because at that parade there was a little girl crying out, "Why isn't God here?" And in that cry we can, without assaulting the concept of divine love, hear the echo of God's anguished cry.

If we are to believe in a God who made the world and everything in it, an almighty God whose power and majesty defy comprehension, let us see that God as constrained, bound in ways we may never understand by the very laws God made. But let us believe that those bindings are not absolute. At the very least, let us believe that God's voice can urge us to be the hands of love. At the very least, let us believe that God can be there with us in the midst of tragedy, sharing in our anguished cries.

Whatever we think might bind God's power, let us not believe it binds God's love. Let us not believe it binds our own. Let us feel the solidarity of God's loving presence, and love each other unfettered even in the darkest places.

From the Archives: The Paradox of the Stone and the Challenge of Defining "God"

Since I'm talking about the challenge of defining "God" in my philosophy of religion class this week, I thought I'd reprint this post, from an earlier occasion when I covered the same material.

This week in my philosophy of religion class we are talking about the concept of God. Since I have already expressed my views on how "God" should be defined in Is God a Delusion?, I don't intend to simply repeat myself here. But I do want to say a few words about some common challenges to the coherence of the traditional Western theological understanding of God--which, in the language I use in my book, is a "substantive definition" (one that defines God in terms of a set of properties) as opposed to an ostensive definition (which would define God by metaphorically "pointing," as Schleiermacher does when he defines God as the "Whence" of our feeling of absolute dependence) or a formal one (which sets out a procedure for arriving at divine properties, as Anselm does) or a functional one (which is what I tend to favor).

As I worded it in class, the dominant substantive definition of God in Western theology takes God to be "the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator of the world who is transcendent, eternal, and self-existent."

One common challenge to God thus conceived targets the property of omnipotence, arguing that it is incoherent to attribute this property to anything. Another challenges the co-possibility of divine omniscience and creaturely freedom. Of course, the most historically important objection to theism is the argument from evil, which in some of its forms challenges the possibility of there existing a being characterized by omnipotence and omnibenevolence in a world with the amount and kind of evil we find in this one (I won't consider this challenge here, since I will be devoting considerable attention to it later in the semester).

The main thing I want to consider here is what significance such challenges have for the devoted religious believer. For this purpose, let me focus on the challenge to divine omnipotence. In its most common form, this challenge starts with the so-called Paradox of the Stone, which asks, "Can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?" The argument, roughly, is that however one answers this question one must reject divine omnipotence. Either God can create such a stone, in which case there is something He cannot do, namely lift said stone; or God cannot create such a stone, in which case there is again something God cannot do.

The traditional response to this argument is to define omnipotence in terms of the capacity to do whatever is logically possible--and then to note that it is not logically possible to create a stone so heavy that it cannot be lifted by a being that has the power to lift every possible stone. As such, on the assumption that God is omnipotent, God creating a stone God cannot lift is logically impossible--and since omnipotence is defined as the ability to do whatever is logically possible, the inability for God to create said stone is no restriction on God's omnipotence. It would be like saying that God cannot create a round square or make it true that two plus two equals seventeen.

Of course, if we define omnipotence as the capacity to do even what is logically impossible, then the paradox of the stone is a non-starter. If logical consistency is of no consequence to God, then God could do the logically impossible thing of creating a stone so heavy God could not lift it...and then lifting it (while it remaining true that God could not do so).

But while this solution to the Paradox of the Stone strikes me as sound insofar as it goes, it obscures what I find to be a deeper and more profound question raised by the paradox: Can an omnipotent being limit its power so that it ceases to be omnipotent? And if it can, would a God who did so thereby cease to be God?

How one answers these questions has some very interesting implications. First of all, it has implications for what one thinks about about the idea of "kenosis" that has been proposed (and vigorously debated) by some Christian theologians. "Kenosis" refers to a kind of divine "emptying" that some theologians invoked to help to make sense of the Christian doctrine of incarnation. The question at issue has to do with how Jesus' humanity is to be understood in relation to His divinity. If God is all-knowing, and if Jesus is God, does that mean the baby Jesus was born with a full knowledge of 21st Century string theory and could have explained it at three weeks of age to anyone who might have understood what He was saying?

Some theologians have thought that to answer "yes" to questions of this kind is to strip Jesus of his humanity. To be human involves living a human life--and to be born possessing all the infinite knowledge of the universe pretty much precludes that. Such a being would be a divine being wearing human skin, not a human being at all. But Jesus is supposed to be both fully human and fully God. Is there a way to make sense of this?

Some theologians, inspired in part by Phillipians 2:6-8, suggested that the solution was to suppose that in order to be truly human, the incarnate God "emptied" Himself of at least some divine attributes--in effect becoming limited in knowledge and power, etc. That is, in order to authentically share in the human condition and live in solidarity with God's finite creatures, God didn't just pretend to be a finite creature alongside us but actually took on real finitude.

This idea of kinosis took on different forms among its advocates. Some thought it involved a total abandonment of the divine nature while others distinguished among divine properties--distinguishing God's moral attributes from God's "physical" ones (such things as omnipotence, omniscience, and timelessness) and arguing that the incarnate God preserved the former while abandoning the latter.

What is important to note for my purposes here is that this kenotic theory has implications for how we are to understand divinity. Marilyn McCord Adams, in Christ and Horrors, puts the point in these terms:

If partial absolute kenosis (the theory that Jesus is emptied of God's "physical" attributes but not the moral ones) retains the traditional claim that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could not exist without being God, it insists that not all the perfections formerly thought to be essential to Godhead were genuinely necessary to It. So-called physical attributes are allegedly the permanent but contingent possession of the Father and the Holy Spirit, and are contingently had, then abandoned, then repossessed by the Son. Thus, it seems, with respect to some perfections, Godhead essentially includes a capacity for them but not their actuality. (Italics in original)
Here we have a theology which, metaphorically speaking, maintains that God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it--that, in other words, it is in the power of God to impose real limits on God's capacity to exercise power (as well as on God's knowledge, eternity, immunity from harm, etc.) but that the God so limited remains God.

Another variant of kenosis can be and has been posited apart from the uniquely Christian concern with making sense of the incarnation. Specifically, some have argued that the very act of creation is an act of the divine imposing limits on itself--that a divine withdrawal and abdication of power is essential for establishing the "otherness" of the created world, thus preserving its status as a reality distinct from God that can evolve on its own terms and eventually acquire (in accord with its own rules) the capacity to autonomously enter into a self-other relationship with God. This is an idea articulated, for example, in the kabbalistic notion of Tzimtzum, and it is also expressed in the writing of Simone Weil. Put simply, the idea is that the existence of a universe that isn't simply swallowed up into God requires the establishment of a kind of boundary or demarcation between God and the created world, one which implies limits on what God can do in relation to that world. On this view, in effect, the act of creating the universe is an act of creating a stone that God cannot lift.

The question then becomes, does God remain God after creation if the act of creation necessitates divine limitation? Or, perhaps better, do those who ascribe to theological views like Tzimtzum have to give up calling the object of their religious devotion God? I don't think so, but if not it makes little sense to insist that "God" just means what is expressed in the traditional substantive definition above. The fact is that people who believe in God can disagree about just how essential the various properties ascribed to God in this definition really are.

And someone who thinks God in fact possesses all of the properties identified in the traditional definition may well agree that these properties do not define God. For example, you might well think that my eyes are a particular shade of blue. But suppose someone demonstrated to you that it was physiologically impossible for human eyes to possess that specific shade, given the manner in which eye color arises. Would you conclude that I don't exist? Surely not--because, although you thought I possessed this specific property, it was never a property that you took to be definitive of me.

Likewise, there is presumably room to accept that a certain property you had formerly attributed to God is one you must give up on, without thereby being forced to give up on the claim that there is a God. But this raises in a new way the question of what, precisely, a theist is asserting when they assert that God exists. If someone ceases to be a theist--what, specifically, are they denying that they had once believed? And why is it that some undergo radical reconceptions in their beliefs while still professing to be theists? What is it that they still believe that warrants holding onto the "theist" label?

This is what I think a functional definition--a definition in terms of the role or function God fills in the life of the devoted theist--is helpful for. In class the other day, a student defined God, roughly, as that in which he could place his hope in times that otherwise would call for despair. This is a functional definition. Given this understanding of God, the believer might radically change their idea of God--but so long as God, thus characterized, could be a source of hope in the midst of despair for those who believed in it, it would still qualify as "God."