The Church and Hard Questions

 “We have a thousand questions and you’ve given three answers! What are you doing swanking about with this…when children are being sprayed with bullets and our hearts are broken? Where is God, old man? Where is he, and what does he want from us?”  

In First Things this week Elizabeth Scalia asks the question, “Does the Church need to do better on big questions?”  She discusses the above tweet, addressed to Pope Benedict after the school shooting in Newtown.  She writes,

 “does the Pope (and the church) need to do better with the “hard” questions of faith that are now subject to New Media?

Or do we — and especially the non-believers who are pining for “big” questions — simply not understanding the depth of the answers?”

The truth is that the Church does, in fact, need to do better with the hard questions.  I don’t speak of the pope in particular.  The pope’s writings reveal that he is very much engaged with the hard questions – probably more engaged than most ordinary people are.  

And therein, to me, lies the problem.  The pope is engaged with the hard questions, but are ordinary Christians engaged with them?  Do ordinary Christians even recognize the enormity of the questions?  In response to Scalia’s suggestion that we may not be “understanding the depth of the answers.”  I would suggest that we aren’t understanding the depth of the questions.  

As I have watched reactions unfold since Newtown, it has become apparent that Christians all too frequently reach for easy answers.  

Why did this happen?

Most of us at this point have seen the internet memes that inform us that God allowed this to happen because he was mad about prayer being banned in public schools.  

Such statements represent a reaction that entirely fails to take seriously the question, “Why?” It jumps to the conclusion that we know God’s mind, that we understand this tragedy.  It makes the astonishing assumption that we can know why this happened.

When tragedy occurs, the questions that arise are tremendous.  Where is God? What does He want from us?

These are huge questions.  They are the right questions. They are questions that cannot be answered in 140 characters or less. They can’t even be answered in 140 pages.  These are questions that we have to carry with us, questions we have to live with.

It is hard to live with unanswered questions.  It is hard to live with an open question pulling at you, but I would argue that it’s essential to the life of faith.  These kinds of questions are not questions we pose to a void.   They are not questions we should pose to ourselves, seeking a theological or political answer.  When we, as Christians, take these big questions seriously, we are asking a person, “Where are you?  What do you want from us?”  

The pope, in his tweets, says, “Remember that he is always beside you.”  But we have to ask, “Where?” and we have to live with that open question so that we will look.  

The pope tells us, “Pray, always.”  Prayer asks these questions, “Where are you?  What do you want from us?” 

The pope is not offering easy answers, but he is offering a way.  Remember.  Pray.  Ask.

If Christians are responding to the “big questions” with easy answers (even if simply with nice, theological answers and not with internet memes) it is a sign that we have failed to take the questions seriously, that perhaps we have failed to ask them at all.  In this respect, the admonishments of atheists like the one quoted above should strike us to the heart.  He may not believe, but he asks.