Soul Food:Searching for answers an incredible journey

Had Eric Mataxas written his book “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid to Ask)” four decades ago, it might have saved me a lot of grief. Not that I was afraid, mind you, to ask the questions I had about God.

I was a kid. I didn’t know any better. Ask I did.

But when I asked my mother, she’d suggest I ask my father. When I asked my father, he’d tell me to ask our Episcopal parish priest.

The parish priest would mutter and sputter, repeating phrases I’d memorized from the catechism. I could have understood calculus better than them.

No matter. I got the gist: It’s more important to believe than to understand.

Once he told me it would be best to pose a certain question to the bishop. So, the next time the bishop was in town, I did.

After the church service, I waited in line behind the adults at the coffee hour. At my turn, I followed their example, shook the bishop’s hand, said good morning and let him know what was on my mind.

“I’ve heard that God thinks men are smarter than women.” I said. “Is that why women aren’t allowed to be priests?”

The bishop smiled. “God thinks men are smarter than women, does he? No. No. I don’t think so,” he said. “But women as priests? It would look funny, don’t you think, for a priest standing before the altar to be pregnant?

“But why are you worrying your pretty head about that? You don’t want to be a priest do you?” he asked.

I assured him I didn’t. “I’d rather be a bishop,” I said. He then took me by the hand and led me on a search for a chocolate doughnut.

My parents at times, as they did that morning, would ask, “Well, did you get an answer for your question?” And often as not I’d have to say, “To be honest, no.”

Then they would look at each other and shake their heads. My father might heave his chest and sigh. My mother worried aloud that I thought too much.

From my vantage point, I began to suspect that, when it came to God, my parents might have nearly as many questions as I did. And nearly as few answers.

If they did have questions, they also had the adult manners not to ask them. I had no way to know it but they very well could have used a copy of Metaxas’ book, too.

When my grandmother died after a long and brutal battle with cancer, my mother’s grief outran her reticence. One question in particular rose to the top.

It was a question that must have been there all along, skulking under the surface, waiting for a fissure great enough to leap through. Surely it was there a decade before, when the young daughter of family friends burned to death in a freak accident.

I was a very young child at the time, and it certainly crossed my mind. It stuck with me worse than chewing gum on the sole of my shoe.

Now, in her sorrow and anger, my mother let the question fly. She clung to it and wouldn’t let go. Who could answer it?

No one seemed to have an answer for my mother. The parish priest was her best hope. When he didn’t have an answer that satisfied her, she went looking for answers elsewhere.

She took up reading the works of psychics Edgar Cayce and Jean Dixon. She bought a crystal ball. She slowly drifted away from attending church, and I went with her.

I started to believe what I was reading and being taught in school: Christianity was a hoax, a crutch at best for those who didn’t know any better. At worst, it was a myth ? not much different, really, than those of the Greeks and Romans ? used by those in power to subjugate the masses.

If ever there had been a God, he was dead. He’d been slain by the double-edged ax of science and philosophy.

Eric Mataxas says the question my mother and I were struggling with is “as big as questions get, and people who try to give you a pat answer are kidding you and themselves both.” He words the question like this: “Why would a loving God allow suffering?”

Or, more fleshed out, like this: “If there is such a thing as evil and if there is a God who is good, why would this supposedly good God create a world with so much evil and suffering in it?” For a question as big as questions get, he spend six pages on it.

It was for me the most disappointing chapter in his book, but it made me think. How would I answer the question? How have I answered it for myself?

I walked out of church once and didn’t walk back in for more than 20 years. When I did, I was no longer furious with God about evil and the suffering it caused in this world.

My anger had nearly consumed me. For many of those years, I lived on the brink of suicide. Then I caught a glimpse of the darkness of my own heart that both shattered my anger and strengthened me.

In that moment, I couldn’t imagine any wickedness that, apart from the grace of God and in the right circumstances, I couldn’t have wreaked on the world myself. As the old schoolyard saying goes, I was pointing a finger at God, but the other three were pointing back at me.

I agree with Mataxas when he says, “On the question of God and suffering, there is no completely satisfactory answer.” He points out many books have been written attempting its answer.

I found it to be an impossible question to answer without knowing something about god ? not god as I thought he should be, but God as he’s said he is. It was an impossible question to answer without knowing something about the nature of evil and my capacity for it.

It was an impossible question to answer without answering a lot of other questions first. Questions like “How can anyone take the Bible seriously?” or “Isn’t one religion about as good as another?” or “What’s the point of prayer?”

Mataxas answers these questions and nearly two-dozen others in a way that’s been described as “pithy, practical, often funny ? and true.” In that roundabout way, he goes a long way toward answering the question about God, evil and suffering, too.