Powerless

suffering children

won't God heal them? No, God can't

but the skies can rain

***

Authors note:

Consciously, I tend to be more agnostic these days, but there are times when I instinctively lean towards belief in a higher power.

But I don’t think that “power” is magic.

The most compelling refutation of the existence of God (as God is popularly conceived) is the problem of evil. If evil exists, then why doesn’t a supposedly all knowing, all powerful, all good God do anything about it?

I think that refutation loses some of its punch, when you consider: maybe God just isn’t all powerful. Omnipresence makes some sense. Omniscience, or at least degrees of shockingly deep knowledge, might make sense. But omnipotence? Eh.

Maybe the reason God doesn’t cure cancer and move kids out of the way of hurtling cars, is because God just… can’t.

If God exists, then God may have to follow the same laws the universe follows, that is to say the laws of physics. I

This idea was first put to me by a Franciscan friar who told me that the idea of intercessional prayer always seemed very silly to him. He said the real power of prayer was in the person praying asking God to change his or her own heart. Asking God to solve a physical problem was at worst performative nonsense and at best an exercise in futility— and it could even be dangerous because it gives humans a way to absolve themselves and step back from personal responsibility. He thought it was a shame to see believers contemplate an issue that they could work to solve only to say, with full faith “yeah, that’s a problem, but it’s in God’s hands so I don’t need to do anything about it.”

He said prayer wasn’t action as much as it was a call to action. Praying for the poor and hungry should make one more willing to feed the poor, praying for victims of violence should make one more willing to make peace. Praying for any suffering individual or group should make one more willing to sacrifice and minister to them. And praying for our enemies should make us stop viewing people with bitterness, or willing to entertain the possibilities of revenge.

He passed away before “thoughts and prayers” became a sarcastic buzzword in the modern political jargon, but he would have understood the frustration around that phrase very well.

Perhaps there is no magic wand and no abracadabra, but there are plenty of real human hands that can chip in on charity, reform, and progress—when they aren’t side stepping personal action with the cop out of “letting go and letting God.”