Imagine you are walking down the street. A gang comes up on you and beats you up. While they are beating you up, a police officer (armed, with a gun) sits there like a decoration watching everything happening, doing nothing.
Did the police officer do something wrong? Yes. He abandoned you.
Suppose it was your loving earthly father, again, he is armed with a gun.
Did your earthly father do something wrong? Yes. He abandoned you.
Now, Our Heavenly Father does the same thing. How did he not abandon you?
Frankly, not existing is better than suffering knowing God is just watching, doing nothing to help.
I used to make this same argument, what I would call “the playground analogy” (kids beating up other kids on the playground while the teacher idly watches). The problem here, as you have already been told I think several times, is your attitude, your depression: Your conception of the situation is incorrect (according to the Church). Seek help: Perhaps you need medication, or to do more to help yourself (e.g. exercise whatever you can to the extent that you can – physical exercise is a natural anti-depressant) to get out of this way of thinking.
Here is another way to conceive of the same situation: God helped you throughout the entire beating by preventing you from being hurt worse. Think for example of the metal cage of a car. Someone crashes into you, the car takes the brunt of the blows. You still get hurt, but if it wasn’t for the car’s design protecting you, you’d have been hurt far worse.* This is the point of that “footprints on the seashore” poem where Jesus was in fact carrying the person during their greatest suffering, despite their not realizing it.
So why doesn’t Jesus appear and personally intervene when someone hurts us? In addition to the obvious reason that this earth is our platform to grow in preparation for heaven – this earth is not heaven – I have experientially discovered a second reason, working through my own suffering as I grow in holiness and await God’s healing: As Job said, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord,” and we know after Job prayed and waited sufficiently, God restored what He had taken: God depriving us of good things is a means for us to grow in relationship with Him. C.S. Lewis also discusses this in
The Problem of Pain, though I didn’t understand it when I read it. If we respond rightly to our misery, we come to see that God is the good, all other suffering as nothing in comparison. St. Paul says the same thing; I’m trying to recall the passage.
1 Cor 2:9 relates this point about heaven … Ah,
Romans 8:18 is where he says the same thing: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us.”
In short, if I focus on the good that I’m lacking, my misery intensifies in my bitterness. If I focus on God, especially recognizing that He deprived me of that good (the human who did it was only His instrument) because He loves me, then I can obtain some sort of peace, knowing that it is for my greater good, and that God will give it back to me when I am ready for it. (Cf.
2 Maccabees 7:10-11.)
- Even more to the point, I think this is central to understanding the Passion: We do evil things that demand justice, and God delivers the brunt of this punishment on Himself, in His mercy shielding us from the punishment our evil deeds deserve. Hence Jesus says John 15:13, i.e. jumping on our dropped grenade.
Of course this is a mystery, why God would give us free will, enabling us to commit such evil – sometimes I think I’d rather have been a pet cat (“a content pig”) rather than a man, but I suppose I don’t understand my own worth. Perhaps a hint comes from noting that all this is easy to say, but terribly difficult to live: The drama of life, I think, underscores the dignity of man. When we respond rightly, it glorifies God (as a demonstration of His power or sovereignty or goodness; and all attributes of God overlap) to create such radically free creatures who, even when they seem justified in acting against Him, choose Him instead. This sounds vain, but to clarify, our current existence is to enable to us to develop our characters in preparation for heaven, so it’s reasonable to give us hard tests.
