Love above all
If God is so good and all-powerful, how come the world is so evil?
Everyone confronts this question, or a variant of it, at some point. And everyone has his or her own response, including the apparently logical conclusion that there cannot be a God and the religious position that evil is allowed or even sent by God to test the faithful.
The absolute answer offered by Christian Science (which states that if God is real, then good is, by definition, infinite, and therefore evil is unreal) can initially appear to be mere sophistry. I’ve felt so at times. Several years ago I even hurled the open Bible as hard as I could against my bedroom wall in disgust, closely followed by the open Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. I even hurled my copy of the Christian Science Quarterly, which contains the weekly Christian Science Bible Lessons, against the wall for good measure.
I had just been reading passages in those books about God’s sweetness and light and love, and I felt disgusted at the apparently vast distance between what I was reading and what I knew was happening in the world. The news at the time was of continuing systematic, large-scale massacres of civilians—including women, children, and even babies—in another part of the world. I felt overwhelmed by a mixture of personal powerlessness, anger at the apparent indifference of the political leaders of the “international community,” and frustration at the even deeper apathy and ignorance of the majority of their constituents. The goodness of man in the image of God seemed like a very bad joke, and there was no magic wand to make things suddenly better.
After a while, my despair started to soften, and I felt as if I were in conversation with a questioning “silent voice”:
“Did Love commit these massacres?”
“No, but … ”
“Did Love tell people to commit these massacres?”
“No, of course not, but … ”
“Is Love the cause of the brutality?”
“No, but … ”
“Is there anything in these massacres to prove conclusively that Love, truly lived, is powerless to stop them or even prevent them?”
“Er … can you repeat that?”
“You heard.”
Eventually, I was forced to admit that divine Love was neither to blame nor powerless. After a long while, I even picked up the books again and smoothed out the pages.
In the days, weeks, months, and years that followed, I realized that this moment was another of those humble, small beginnings essential to the spirituality taught in the Bible. The prophet Elijah, for example, famously did not find the Lord in the destructive power of earthquake, wind, and fire, but in a “still small voice” (see I Kings 19:11, 12 ). The newborn Jesus, according to the Gospel of Luke, had his first bed in an animal feeding trough (see Luke 2:7 ). The adult Jesus, in three Gospel accounts, quoted an ancient psalm to predict that his own teaching would first be dismissed as wrong or irrelevant before people finally realized that it offered the only sure foundation for thought and life (see Psalms 118:22 ; Matthew 21:42 ).
Jesus did not arrive on the scene with an army of conquest. He apparently even let the bad guys win. At his crucifixion, he seemed to be the living proof that “bad things happen to good people.” Why? Because humanity needed tangible proof that Love never abandons anyone, even in death, even after death.
Of course, Christians of all denominations also celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and his final ascension above all material sense. But even without physical proofs of resurrection and ascension in our own lives, anyone who has lost loved ones is aware that love persists. In one touching example, a young woman I know, a former street child, had not only lost her youngest daughter of barely a year to tuberculosis; she had also had her misery compounded by being refused a religious funeral for the child, since the child had not been baptized, and then finding that even the village gravediggers refused to dig a grave because she had no money to pay them.
With friends in a nongovernmental organization, I helped make the necessary arrangements. After the rapidly expedited funeral, through tears, she suddenly smiled and asked me if I remembered driving her and her baby to the hospital a few months earlier. I had put on some funny-sounding rock music in the van, and the baby had gurgled happily. “That’s how we have to remember her,” she added, “not like this.”
Eventually, I was forced to admit that divine Love was neither to blame nor powerless.
As she smiled, I could sense a healing resolve in her, overcoming the all-too-understandable despair and grief. And this healing sense had an uplifting effect on the young woman’s experience. During the next few months, with considerable struggle against poverty and bureaucracy, she and the other members of her family managed to obtain electricity and running water for the home, where they lived together. Despite her negative experiences and continuing hardship, she instinctively rejected the notion that Love was powerless or could ever stop caring for her child or any other child. This underlying spiritual resilience brought healing to her grief and gave her the strength to move forward.
These and similar moments have taught me that even in those desperately sad, deflated, and defeated moments, we catch glimpses of how the infinite nature of Love turns everything else into nothingness.
“God is Love. Can we ask Him to be more?” writes Mrs. Eddy in Science and Health (p. 2 ). Or again: “ ‘God is Love.’ More than this we cannot ask, higher we cannot look, farther we cannot go” (p. 6 ). She makes the point that Love is like the principle of mathematics: It is always there for everyone to understand and apply (see p. 3 ).
Love is not a bullying or domineering force that demands abject pleading; it is always quietly but powerfully and reliably there to be understood. If we receive the wrong change in a shop, we can insist on the correct application of mathematical principle to obtain our due. Only our own ignorance of the principle, or else fear or apathy regarding its application, prevents a just outcome.
In a similar way, the “bad things” that happen in our lives can be overcome and healed by the quiet but true law of Love—even if our first steps in putting this truth into practice appear small. For example, when we begin to pray scientifically about personal difficulties of any nature—be they financial challenges, relationship problems, or even physical ailments—we may be tempted to feel that some resulting healings are “minor,” or that they might have happened anyway. Yet each of these “minor” victories over the self and adversity, like the unsteady, tumble-prone first steps of a child, gradually builds up into the ability to walk, run, leap, and even dance. These victories enable us to follow, in some measure, in the footsteps of Jesus, who healed terminal illnesses, overcame enraged crowds, and triumphed over death itself through quiet, powerful prayer.
Mrs. Eddy devotes the first few pages of the chapter on “Christian Science Practice” in Science and Health to an account and discussion of the biblical story of the “strange woman” who washed Jesus’ feet while he was the guest of a Pharisee (see pp. 362–364 ). Mrs. Eddy’s point is that the first step in understanding and healing has to be humility. Genuine humility releases extraordinary power. In human existence, nothing is more helpless and powerless than a new-born child, but at the same time nothing is more powerful in terms of the affection, resolve, and unsuspected strength that the child awakens in the parents, close family, and caregivers.
Love is like that. It can easily look too small and insignificant to offer any answer to the big problems of existence. It does not always seem to have anything very clever to say. But without it, there is nothing. Love is everything.
