Love and choice: Hating God and making sense

WE (human beings) are simply confronted with a world of things (including persons) which we did not create, and from among those things we must choose what we will love. This means that our love develops as a result of our choice. What we love (and so our destiny) follows from our choice.  

In God, who is the creator and cause of all that exists, it is the other way around: love precedes choice, because love is what moves God’s will to create, to call things into being, in the first place. God’s choice of particular persons, then, and his predestining them for glory, responds to, corresponds to, follows from, his own act of creation, from his own act of will, his own act of love. In this way, God’s choice follows upon, is consequent upon, his love. God's love is the creative origin of the very being of things. Our love is not; our love, and our destiny, follow from our choice.

Now if I love someone and she dies, God let this happen. (In my case, he let my daughter die. Naomi was only two years old, dearly beloved, and yes, if God exists, then he let her die.)

Would it make sense to be angry with God, to hate God, because he lets things like this happen? Perhaps that reaction would be natural or tempting for some people, but that’s different from it making sense. In fact, to be angry with God, to hate God, would be a good indication that I never really loved my daughter, and that I am choosing not to love her now. How so? I know that life is often short (always short, in comparison to eternity), that we all have to die, and I believe that God did not create us only for this life, but for eternal life with him – so, if I really believe that, why would I thank God for loving Naomi into mortal existence and then hate him for loving her into eternal life? I may have intense feelings and emotions towards someone, but I don’t really love her if I despise the person who has given her good things. (This is a real problem for all those who attempt to love their children – or to love anyone, for that matter – while despising God.) If my love for my little girl turns to hatred of God when she dies, then my love wasn’t real, it was selfish possessiveness, directed to my own gratification here and now, and to an irrational insistence on the sufficiency and perfection of my plans for giving her good things, my way of doing things.  When my plans or ideas or expectations fail to materialize and I hate God as a result, this only proves that I had been treating my plans (and thus myself) as equivalent to God. But I’m evidently not God, and I’m not God’s equal, so this attitude simply doesn’t make sense.

So perhaps I could think the following: “This happened to my loved one, and now I feel angry with God; but I do love Naomi and since it simply doesn’t make sense to be angry with God if I believe that through this horrible event he has in fact given her good things, I’ll just stop believing in God altogether (and try to write-off my anger with him as an irrational foible of my human nature).” Does this make sense? Really, not at all. Reasoning in this way implies that what I care most about is justifying my own feelings. But I know – as any honest person knows – that just because I feel a certain way, it doesn’t follow that I should be feeling that way. It is just obvious that my feelings of anger are not, in themselves, an appropriate criterion for determining the truth about anything else. My feelings tell me primarily about me; I have to be very careful if I want to make any inferences regarding other things. In any case, if your love is real, then you will want good things for your loved one, and deciding to give up on your hope for good things for your loved one – not to mention giving up on being reunited with your loved one – just so that you can indulge your anger is hardly a genuinely loving response. It’s actually rather petulant and narcissistic, and again, it just doesn’t make sense.

[A third option would be to think: "She's dead. She's gone. She once was not, for a short time she was, and now she is again nothing, except a memory (which is likewise destined for nothingness). I believe that that's all anyone is, that's all my love for her is, and that's all my pain is: a flash in the pan, that will one day turn out to be nothing." This way of thinking isn't obviously nonsensical, there is even something stodgily noble and tritely comforting about it, but it is also sad, pessimistic, groundless, pusillanimous, and - I'm afraid - stupidly presumptuous.]

One might still think, “Maybe all you just said ‘makes sense,’ but you seem not to understand the way normal people think. Things don’t ‘add up’ and ‘make sense’ for ordinary people in such a neat 'black-and-white' way; they struggle, it’s hard, they need to grieve and rage, and they have a right to think whatever they want to think when something tragic happens or when they feel themselves to be the victims of cosmic injustice. When people are hurting, it’s not fair to assess their reactions in terms of whether they are 'making sense' or not.” It’s true that when people go through traumatic experiences, sometimes they don’t think clearly. And sometimes they really try, but they are simply unable to think clearly. It follows that we shouldn’t expect that they will always think clearly, and we shouldn't be hard on them when they don't (or on ourselves when we don't). It doesn’t follow, however, that they shouldn’t think clearly, that is, that they have a right to think things that don’t make sense ("yay, post-modernism! - it doesn't matter if I make sense!"); or that the nonsense (or the shrivelled resignation) that they end up losing themselves in actually does make good sense, at least for them, in such and such situation: it doesn't. This vacuously subjective attitude is just not how 'sense' works. So it’s true that we can’t assess people’s reactions solely in terms of whether or not they make sense, but that is no excuse for ignoring whether or not they make sense. We can and should have compassion for people who have tangled themselves up in nonsense, but we do people in this situation no favor by patting them on the head and pretending that, “hey, you’re only human, so there's really nothing wrong with the nonsensical way you’re processing things.” In the end, even when shit happens (as it inevitably does), the task lies ever before us of choosing our love - and avoiding doing so in a self-defeating, nonsensical way.