Letter #104: The Fatal Squish Pit

We Must Not Fall In!

Spelunk,

Essentially, you pose two questions. One: Can we know God better and thus occasionally discern his aesthetic in events? And Two: Is that too squishy?

My answers would be, One: Yes, we must believe so or why think about God at all? And Two: No, but we are walking a tightrope over a fatal pit of squish and must not stumble.

According to her substack profile, our commenter Bernadette is the mother of nine children. I was therefore awed and humbled to learn she was listening to my show last week when I mentioned the German Army officer Claus von Stauffenberg.

On July 20^th, 1944, Stauffenberg smuggled a suitcase full of explosives into a conference room and set it down next to Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, after Stauffenberg left, one of the other officers present moved the suitcase. It exploded, but a heavy table leg muffled the blast and Hitler survived. It was one of more than forty failed attempts on the Fuhrer’s life. Hitler believed that providence had repeatedly spared him so that he could pursue his important work — of mass murder and world war.

If Hitler was right, providence is an ass!

We mustn’t begin to think that those dramatic events we favor are acts of God per se. Still less helpful is the idea that “whatever is, is good.” That may be true when the entirety of God’s design is perceived, but to say it of a sick child or, indeed, of Hitler’s survival, would be an obscenity. It would mean our moral sense has no relation to anything real.

Instead, I think, we can draw some wisdom from a C. S. Lewis line: “No one is told any story but their own.”

One of the gifts of a long attentive life is the hard-won wisdom that you are not the author of your story, you are the story being told. That story is not about whether you hit the jackpot or get the girl. It’s about who you become whether or not those things take place.

To trust to God is to move as best you can in the direction of the person he made you to become, to seek that image of him uniquely reproduced in you. In order to do this, you have to believe the story of your soul is larger than the good and bad of life. If you don’t believe this, you are in a meaningless moral chaos. You will say absurd things like, “God saved Trump, but killed Corey Comperatore, the noble fireman who took a bullet while shielding his wife and children?” Or, “God must have wanted Hitler to live to murder more.”

No, what we have faith in is not that Trump was spared to win the presidency, but that Corey Comperatore has already won the starry crown — that even the evil and grief that seem indelible will be washed away when the tale is told in full.

Yer Pops.