What to say?

For clergy, tragedy highlights the ages-old problem of evil

By Clay Evans
Camera Staff Writer

There is a story in the Jewish Talmud about a famous sage whose disciple falls ill.

The teacher pays a visit, prays for afflicted student, who is then healed. After his ordeal, the student goes to his teacher to ask a question.

"Teacher, why do people suffer?"

The sage explains that people do things that create consequences, that human actions ultimately cause human suffering. But the student, still puzzled, asks a famous question, which is rendered in a single word in Hebrew: "But children?"

The rabbi has no answer to that query, according to the Talmud.

"People who are not even of the age to have moral knowledge or responsibility, what can they be punished for?" asks Rabbi Allen Selis of Boulder's Congregation Bonai Shalom.

Such are the kinds of difficult moral questions faced by clergy in the wake of Tuesday's massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton. They are called upon to explain how a kind, loving and powerful God could allow such outrageous suffering and horror.

The questions are natural, following such an incident, but they are far from new. In fact, the question of how to square evil with the Judeo-Christian concept of a loving, omnipotent God is considered by many to be the fundamental theological issue underlying Western religious thought.

"GOD DOESN'T KEEP THINGS FROM HAPPENING NECESSARILY, BUT GOD IS IN THE MIDST OF THE RESPONSE AND THE RECOVERY FROM THE AWFUL THINGS IN LIFE." Rev. David Randall-Bodman Boulder's First Congregational Church

"From time immemorial, the question of why there is evil appears," says Father Joe Ciccone of St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish in Boulder. "Of course, it's a mystery we don't understand. It's a part of the human condition that there are evil situations and people who are hateful and violent."

Rabbi Harold S. Kush-

ner's best-selling book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" argues that the presence of evil in the world precludes the possibility that God is both all-powerful and all-good. Kushner chooses to believe that God is benevolent and loving, concluding finally that God lacks the power to intervene to stave off all human suffering and worldly evil.

That's a view that resonates with many contemporary religious counselors.

"God doesn't keep things from happening necessarily, but God is in the midst of the response and the recovery from the awful things in life," says the Rev. David Randall-Bodman of Boulder's First Congregational Church. "The assumption that God is in control of every little thing that happens — I don't believe in that kind of God."

Neither does Selis: "We might be stretching God a little too far when we assume that God has to be in control of everything. This is personally very hard for me, and I don't want this to be the case, but it gets harder and harder to refute as I live my life."

Such attitudes are far removed from once widely accepted biblical views that humans are born stained by original sin, and that children may be punished for the sins of their fathers going back several generations.

But such rigid proclamations of God's will aren't comforting to many.

Bob Cook, pastor at Boulder Valley Assembly of God, was particularly anguished this week after speaking to the pastor of Rachel Scott, one of the girls killed Tuesday. A witness said the gunman who murdered Scott asked her if she believed in God.

"When she said 'yes,' he pulled the trigger," Cook says, his voice trembling. "I'm here saying, 'God, that's not fair. You should have struck that kid (the gunman) with lightning right then.' But I am not going to be the clay jar who tells the master potter he doesn't know what he's doing."

Although some Buddhists believe in God, Buddhism itself is not generally seen as a theistic tradition. Thus, the ages-old question "Why does God allow evil?" isn't particularly relevant to most Buddhists. However, the first of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths usually is translated as "life is suffering."

"It's a pretty different perspective because, first of all, you have no god to blame," says Marcia Usow, director of practice and study at Karma Dzong in Boulder. "These were the acts of two boys, who from what I can tell, were not readily accepted by other people."

Usow — who emphasizes that she speaks only from her personal perspective — says that such rejection of "outsiders" is in fact a rejection of something in ourselves. She says our entire society, with its emphasis on speed, violence and action, is culpable in the slaughter.

"Even in car ads: They're ramming over rocks and mountains, everything they come across. I'm alarmed at all the speed and aggression implicit in our lives," she says. "Personally, I feel enormous shame as a being in the face of this."

While much emphasis is being placed on spiritually "comforting" those traumatized by Tuesday's brutality, in Buddhist thought, that shouldn't necessarily be the goal.

"This (tragedy) is never going to be comfortable. This stands right up there with the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Vietnam War crimes, the (school) shooting in Oregon," she says. "On the other hand, we are still alive. For us there has to be some lesson. Comfort might actually not allow the lesson to be as powerful."