Gratitude, Legos, and the Divine Plan. Post #2

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11422779.post-1127919352116297412005-09-28T10:42:00.000-04:002005-09-28T10:55:52.146-04:00Gratitude, Legos, and the Divine Plan. Post #2Global Gratitude Mau: “Everything we have is already a miracle.” Michael, similarly: “What we should be asking for is not more blessings, but to realize and be grateful for the blessings we have already received.” La Coloratura: “When we {learn to} recognize {those things that we already} have more often than {those which we lack}, then we begin to experience real joy. And I think the more one takes time to be grateful, the more one will find that every day contains a myriad of opportunities to experience gratefulness. As an example, I can experience gratitude by marveling in the beauty and strength of my granite kitchen counter. Nothing more than that, and I am filled with a deeper sense of well-being and peace.” I’ve also had a sense of joy and peace tinged with gratitude in relation to the simplest things: the sun on my back, the blue sky, how the air feels and smells. Being itself is a “given,” a surprise, nothing that we can personally account for or explain. So in this sense, it seems to me that life can have a feeling of being something like a “gift” regardless of our religious beliefs or lack thereof. And I like Doshar’s, “Even the patience with which we face hardships is a blessing from God.” This again strikes me as pointing to something very basic: the strength and resilience by which so many of us are able to survive even terrible adversity. Here is something that we can find within ourselves which is again gift-like or given, something amazing and more than we can account for, whatever our beliefs or world view. I find no conflict in feeling a global sense of joy, peace, and gratitude in relation to the elemental and basic things that inform and surround us, and that sustain all our lives. There is nothing here to me that seems contradictory or in need of explanation. For me, this includes SH’s gratitude in relation to all those who came before us. From basics like farming or the invention of written language, to the computer, the things we do and enjoy day to day were made possible by the prior creations, discoveries, and actions of others. Being Particularly Grateful… Now here’s where it gets tricky… Some of us have much more to be grateful for than others in terms of the specific circumstances and events of our lives. The poor, the ill, victims of crime and war… Others of us watch it all on TV, troubled by whether we should take out a fifteen or thirty year mortgage. The contrasts in our varied… “fortunes?” – “blessings?” - are enormous. Here are some explanations often given for the discrepancies. Some but not all are derived from your comments. Explanations for Special Blessings Good Things Happen to Good People; Bad Things… – This was the position of Job’s friends in the Book of Job. “He must be sinning in secret.” Even though Job outwardly appeared to be a good and faithful man, he must not be; otherwise God would bless rather than punish him. Here are three variations on this theme: 1. God had no special purpose in mind for, say, those other people who died in the crash that nearly killed me - or for anyone else whose life goes down in flames through no apparent fault of their own. Those other guys just aren’t quite as important in the divine plan as I am. 2. Sickness is necessarily a sign of spiritual or psychological unwellness. 3. Even if the person appears to be perfectly wonderful, they must have done terrible things in a past life if their present hardships are great. Justice prevails when we reap the consequences of things for which we have no memory. (Problems: Memory is the crux of identity. It’s what makes Alzheimer’s disease so dreaded. Most of us are clueless about having had any past lives. It’s hard for me to see any justice or even sense in receiving troubles or benefits for things that an “I” did of whom I have no recollection and yet was somehow purportedly “me.”) God’s Mysterious Ways – Even when, say, an elementary school girl is raped and murdered, it’s part of the divine plan of an all-powerful, all-good Entity. Words like “senseless,” “meaningless,” “chaotic,” and even “random” or “chance,” actually have no meaning. Everything that happens is happening exactly according to God’s preconceived arrangement. Everything, and in every detail and particular, is always for the best. Whatever happens – that’s exactly what needs to happen and has to happen and how it needs to happen. Caveats are usually tossed out at this point to show that human evil somehow isn’t God’s fault even when God is conceived of as all-powerful - and without any form of limitation or restriction on that power - as well as all-good. Caveat One: Human evil isn’t God’s fault; it’s the fault of our sinful nature. Well then, our sinful nature and redemption… this is not part of God’s plan?? So... is there really a plan or not? Caveat Two: God had to allow for evil in order to give us “free choice” otherwise we’d be zombies etc. First, notice that any notion of “had to” is a limitation on God’s power. (Incidentally, that’s okay by me – and it’s also okay in “process theology.” The idea of God as all powerful doesn’t have to mean “able to do absolutely whatever he wants at every moment.”) Second, I don’t know for a fact that what makes us non-zombies after we’ve had coffee in the morning is the ability to choose. It might just be the coffee. Or maybe what makes us non-zombies is our sense of humor. If God had at least made a small minority of zombie-people, then we would have gotten to see what really makes a zombie a zombie; but this was left out of the plan. Third: an all powerful God who created the world ex-nilos surely could have allowed for choice and its assumed anti-zombie effects by making the world a place where we had free choice along a spectrum of options ranging from better to best. An all-powerful Master Planner could have omitted the evil Lego pieces, leaving us free to choose from among other colors. Nothing Bad Happens - Every cloud is overflowing with silver linings. The “bad” things are really for the best because they make us stronger or provide us with valuable life lessons. Every murder, rape, torture and genocide that occurs is well worth it because the rest of us learn so much, even though this stuff has been going on since the dawn of civilization and we still haven’t learned, say, how to stop it. What Do You Think? You can probably tell that none of these explanations really works well for me. Is there some other explanation that I’ve missed? Or have I oversimplified – maybe one of the above explanations is really quite adequate if it were stated properly?<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/11422779-112791935211629741?l=spiritualdiablog.blogspot.com'/></div>Paulnoreply@blogger.com25