by Sr. Organza
You hear it often from some on the right – it’s God’s will. The right like to use the term like an old kitchen chair. Today it’s a seat – tomorrow a ladder. They invoked God’s will when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans claiming that hosting Southern Decadence was the reason God did not spare the city. Ironically enough, the neighborhood where the festival was held was virtually untouched. They also use it whenever an inexplicable national tragedy occurs to explain the pain away as divinely ordained. Like using a controversial image of white Jesus welcoming freshly drowned little girls from Camp Mystic into heaven. The most prominent use of the phrase occurred last year at this time while Donald Trump was on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania and he survived an assassination attempt miraculously without any scars or damage to his ear. The bold claim was made that God wanted Trump to survive the attack to save America from the dastardly deeds of the liberals who wanted to destroy America by making it freer.
Whenever someone invokes “the will of God” I laugh a little. It is one thing if you are religious and acknowledge divine providence. However, it does not suggest in any way what God’s endgame might be. It is incredibly arrogant and just this side of blasphemous to claim to know what God’s will is, especially for a human being. Trump did survive a shoddy attempt at his life. But saying that God’s reason for this happening was so that Trump could save us from trans drag queen story hour is another level of heretical stupidity. The truth, the undeniable truth, is that we do not know why things happen – good or bad. God is eternal, so time and space mean very little to him. The Hebrews were enslaved for 400 years in Egypt and it took Moses several more decades to get it together and help out. If God took his merry old time in saving his chosen people from indescribable toil and abuse why would he suddenly peek over at America and immediately want to intervene in our political structure? He’s a big fan of baseball? He like hot dogs? He cannot resist the smell of apple pie cooling?
It is one thing to say it was God’s will that it rained today. It is an entirely different ball of wax to say that it was God’s will that it rained today to flood a lesbian’s basement. How the hell would anyone know that? This is no different from claiming that Trump getting shot and surviving to save America is God’s will. We cannot possibly know his goals in doing the things that he does. We know this to be true because it happened before with another dictator of unusually small endowment and bad hair.
On November 8, 1939, a German carpenter planted a bomb at the venue where Adolf Hitler was to give a speech. The assassin timed his mechanism perfectly so the bomb would detonate moments before he ended his speech. But, by some act of God, Hitler, a normally pompous windbag known for ranting and roving speeches that eventually made no sense left that venue earlier than anticipated due to his travel schedule.
Only minutes after Hitler had left the building, the bomb exploded killing 8 people and injuring 62. There is no way Hitler would have survived that attack and World War II would likely have been over much more quickly. This is a perfectly analogous situation. Beloved leader narrowly escapes an attempt on his life by what appears to be a miracle. The propaganda machine then billed it as God’s will that Hitler should live so he could make Germany great again and lead his people on to victory in war. We obviously know NOW that this was not the outcome. Adolf Hitler slowly devolved into madness bringing the countries of Germany and Austria into calamitous ruin before finally killing himself and his bride and then having their bodies set on fire.
But in 1939 when the Nazi spin machine said that it was God’s will that Hitler survived, nobody knew that Germany was headed for disaster. Ultimately, we know the results of the war. Germany was not made great. Millions of people around the world died. Hitler was not the savior of the Aryan race. Hitler was not saved to make Germany great again. He was kept alive so that eventually all of humanity would recall the depraved depths to which we as a species were capable of sinking and how close we came to our self-annihilation. As an added bonus, Hitler’s death also showed us what becomes of those who would proclaim themselves tyrants.
God abhors any unnatural or selfishly imposed limitation on the potential of humankind. His answer to making any nation great is not a demented, bloated, megalomanic with terrible hair and makeup to lead America into some kind of weird golden age. But I don’t know God’s will either. That’s the point. We just do not know nor can we know what his purpose for something happening might be. God’s creative work can span weeks, months, decades, eons, ages. Earth has been undergoing constant renovation since it was created billions of years ago. I am sure it came as a big surprise to the dinosaurs when an asteroid wiped them all out. Up until that point, it had been God’s will that they should dominate earth – until it wasn’t. God’s brush strokes are broad and long.
It is prideful and greedy indeed to claim that God saved one person for whatever purpose is invoked. Aside from knowing that Trump did in fact survive the attempt on his life, we know nothing more. It is just as plausible, especially knowing what we know about Hitler, that Trump was spared for reasons probably not as savory to his supporters. Perhaps he was kept alive as a grand example of the downfall of humans when greed and ignorance combine. One more example of the folly of invoking God’s will – the Civil War. Both the North and the South said that they were instruments of God in God’s holy purpose. Oddly enough they were both right just not in the way they thought.
Faith is trusting that all things that happen do so for some purpose and that whatever that is, it will ultimately be good for us. But that’s where it ends. It is not possible to know what that future will look like. When God saved the Jewish nation, and led them out of Egypt, could they have possibly known what was going to happen to them? They had faith and followed. They wandered for 40 years in a barely hospitable desert and finally reached their goal. But the Jewish people still have no idea where it is they are being led- only that they ARE being led.
When we live in a world of spiritual certainty we breed violence, hatred, and oppression. We live out lives in an obnoxious circus, pretending to be our own ringmasters. Yet much to our surprise, humans are just the clowns. The so-called Christians in this country have abandoned faith and replaced it with a perverted idolatry of personality.
Our futures are not a promise. Your next breath is not a guarantee. The moment you are living in is an immeasurable gift. So, the question is, how did we spend this divine gift? Did we honor our creator and his creation by protecting it and responsibly partaking in the wonder of life? Did you maybe repay that gift and do something kind for someone? Did you remember the miracle that is your next moment and be merciful and generous as a mirror to what you yourself have been given? Or did you spend that moment devouring the earth’s resources? Bullying someone you do not know and who has done nothing to you because you disagree with their gender or sexuality? Your displeasure at another’s existence is only YOUR displeasure – not God’s. God willed that every gay, lesbian, trans and queer kid should be born and live just as much as he willed it that some orange asshole should be born and live.
It is the height of hypocrisy to claim to know God’s will when you can barely figure out your own damn life. Maybe spend some time thinking about that instead of peeping into someone else’s bedroom window and making their lives hell.
