Yes, Virginia, there is a God

How can we reconcile a happy holiday for our kids, while children in the Holy Land are dying in record numbers? 

A few weeks ago, I was reading a bedtime story to my 15-month-old daughter Skye, and I had to stop after a few pages. Not for the normal reasons: that she lost the plot and was crying, but because I was. Skye is still young enough that my tears don’t really register with her; they may confuse her or make her laugh, especially when I smile and feign cheerfulness to protect her from my despair. In the moment, the artifice was so evident: We were snuggled together, looking up at her nightlight, painting roving blue stars on the ceiling, her plastic lantern mimicking the sounds of crickets, a mechanical forest falling asleep. I thought of the cocoon that we create for our children, the soft lights and white noise, the false smiles to mask tears, the equivalent of wrapping them in cotton wool for as long as possible, protecting them from the frightening realities of the world.

The book I was reading was gifted to us by our church for Skye’s Baptism. It’s called Near, based on Psalm 139. It begins: 

God is my Father who made everything. 

And I am a little explorer of the wide world. 

He is near me and he protects me. 

He sees me and he knows me. 

The difference between this night and others was that before reading this book, I had read a very different type of story: a report issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), citing over 4,000 children killed in Gaza, averaging about 100 a day. At the writing of this, the death toll has reached 20,000, according to another UN report. This makes the run-up to Hanukkah and Christmas 2023 the deadliest time of conflict for children in modern times. In November, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres called Gaza “a graveyard for children.” As a parent, and as a person raised in the Christian faith, having a happy Christmas while war rages in the part of the world where Jesus was born feels at best uncomfortable. At worst, it feels like a grievous sin.  

In this light, the words in the book seemed to be another comforting deception, like Skye’s “starry sky” nightlight. It also reminded me of the children’s game “Two Truths and a Lie:” Skye may be a little explorer, but is God actually her father? One could argue that there is a God, but does he see, know and protect her? 

Did he see, know and protect the dead Palestinian child being kissed by her father that I saw in a photo last week? 

Did he see, know and protect the 12-year-old girl named Dina, who, after surviving the death of her family and the amputation of her leg, was killed by Israeli tank fire as she lay recovering in Naser Hospital?

Of course, there is always suffering happening somewhere, during joyful moments elsewhere. Of course, questioning the existence of God in times of suffering is as old as suffering itself, as old as the concept of God, as old as Job, and later Jesus, crying to ask why they have been forsaken.

Perhaps the war in Israel and Palestine has shaken me so much both because I am a new parent and because of the relative peace and privilege of my existence. While my life has not always been charmed, I have not yet been visited by horror and loss in the way many have. But I have learned about it through the experience of others. As a teenager, I was forever changed by reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which reckons with suffering and spirituality with extraordinary wisdom and fortitude.

What struck me about Frankl’s account of maintaining a rich inner life, including his sound mind, while being subjected to the unimaginable terrors of Nazi concentration camps, was that his theology was simply based on love. What struck me wasn’t really his Judaism, but his humanism. When enduring extreme pain and loss, he meditates on love. He writes:

My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing — which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self.

“Love,” Frankl goes on to write, “is stronger than death.”

Frankl also introduced me to Stoicism, which has since become a defining practice for me, perhaps even more so than my foundational Christianity. Stoicism has given me something internal to cling to during difficult times. While Christianity relies on the sacrifice of Jesus and the mercy of God, Stoicism offers a means of accessing peace within myself that doesn’t require a leap of faith. Frankl and the Stoics emphasize that, even when life has stripped us of our posessions, our health, and our loved ones, we still have our mind. We can still make our own reasoned choices; we can find peace in the fact that, even if imprisoned, our minds are ours and ours alone.

While this encourages me to maintain my sound mind and spiritual life, even in the face of unimaginable suffering in Gaza, it does not reconcile for me the Judeo-Christian belief in a benevolent, omniscient, all-powerful God. Logically, God must not be one of those things for occurences like the Holocaust or the current war campaign in Palestine to take place. Surely God cannot exist as we good Christians and Jews have been taught if these things continue to happen. Right?

In a recent article in Christian Ethics Today, retired minister (and family friend) Roger Sullivan grapples with the question: How can we maintain faith amid suffering and loss? He comes from a position of appropriate experience. Thirty years ago, his wife and 17-year-old daughter were in a car accident. His daughter was killed, and his wife has since been paralyzed from the neck down.

Roger writes that after the accident, he was not angry with God. He did not question the existence of God (which he partially attributes to his extensive theological education), and he even prayed the most difficult but necessary prayer: “Not my, but your will be done.”  

Roger writes that God’s intention was to create a world where humans are fully free. Since we have free will, if God intervened and saved us from our mistakes, even our worst and most deadly mistakes, our free will and our reasoned choices (that backbone of Stoicism) would have no meaning.

Roger writes: Some people have said to me that what happened to us was so unfair. Actually, it is somewhat painful to say it, but it was completely fair. If I would have had my way, I would have asked God to be unfair – unfair for just a split second, and alter the laws of physics in our favor, so that when the car tire disentegrated, causing the car to hit a tree, no harm would have come to Shirley or Joy. But if he had, would that have been fair to all the others and their families who have died in similar ways?  

Roger has reconciled this tragedy with his belief in God and his identity as a Christian. Roger continued to be a minister and lead a church while nursing his wife and his own broken heart.

“People often lay things at God’s feet that God did not do or cause,” he writes.  

In his acceptance of life in the face of tragedy, in his capacity to live with human suffering without succumbing to despair, Roger amazes me. I am not as evolved as Roger. I have not arrived at this acceptance. I still seek to answer the unanswerable questions, still have an itchy desire to grab God by the shoulders and demand: Why?

I wonder, if God does not exist as benevolent, omniscienct, and all-powerful, then what does he exist as? How can I continue to call myself a Christian, if, while I believe in the teachings of Christ, I struggle to believe in the God he preached about?

Two weeks ago, I thought of this as I watched the snow fall peacefully on the mountains outside of my hospital window. I was there for a joyful, not a tragic, reason. It was in this safe, clean, quiet hospital outside of Geneva that I gave birth to our son, Lucas. I questioned my prayers for a healthy baby, and it felt arrogant to believe that my small prayers carried weight, when I imagine the heft of all of the prayers of the desperate mothers in Gaza, preparing to give birth without anesthesia, without medical equipment, without adequate food and water. What hubris to say a prayer for this baby born into such luck, such cushy surroundings. How could I contort my mind into believing in a God that would listen to my prayer when so many women’s prayers for their babies to thrive, to live, in that place we call “the Holy Land” have not been answered?

Sometimes, balancing my Christianity with the hard truths of the world feels like mental gymnastics that I am not limber enough to perform. And yet, my faith has been such an integral part of my upbringing and identity that I cannot bear to jettison them in favor of an entirely logical understanding of the world.

In these moments, I try to find solace in learning to live with questions that will not be easily, or ever, answered. I try to sit with the fact that I will not be able to answer some questions neatly or satisfyingly for my children, and they too will go out into the world to seek answers to address their own existential longings..

There is a Bible verse that helps me alleviate my questions about the nature of God. It is from the book of John, 4:16: “God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” For me, this becomes the inverse: Love is God. With this in mind, Viktor Frankl imagining his wife’s face while on a death march is a prayer. This is God, alive in a man, through the love of his wife.

 This makes God easier to swallow for me – the idea that God that is divine goodness in us. Just as we humans are capable of doing evil - and are currently doing evil on the world stage, as we see the children of Gaza dying in record numbers – we too are capable of divine goodness. This idea of God makes me think of that elusive third part of the trinity: God as an apparition of goodness; God as spirit manifest in human beings.

For those parents struggling with how to reconcile the global loss of children with their faith – and the guidance of their own children – I see two things that might help. One is to use Jesus, the human being, rather than God, the supernatural, as a model. Jesus’s faith was one of action. A devout Jew set on reforming the church, he preached radical acceptance and forgiveness; he fed the hungry and befriended the needy. He praciticed a faith of deed rather than word. In that light, the most effective way we can manage our feelings about this crisis is not about us and our feelings, it is about helping those actually affected. Our family has donated to UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund), who deliver emergency birth kits and supplies for obstetric and neonatal care to women and babies in Gaza. There are many other charities who are focused on supporting Palestenians at this time, and organizations like Amnesty International help make it easy to write your congressperson or sign petitions asking the US government to insist on a ceasefire.  Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center is also a source of news, community and guidance from the Christian perspective, based in Palestine. Sometimes, when thinking feels too difficult, doing the right thing is the answer.

When it comes to the more existential question, I look to the model put forth by Francis Pharcellus Church in 1897, publisher of New York’s The Sun. When he received the now-famous letter from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon asking “Is there a Santa Claus?” his response, which married wonder and reality, serves as a timeless model for how to answer tough questions asked by children. Church wrote to Virginia that Santa Claus existed "as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist.” He told Virginia that just because something wasn’t visible didn’t mean it wasn’t real: "Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world." Without belief in the enchanting and inexplicable, like Santa Claus - and for me, God - the world, Church writes, would be a “dreary” place.

I hope that this is how I can help my children navigate a world that sometimes appears to be Godless. That there is a strong, benevolent force of love in the world that will watch over Skye. That little Lucas’s fragile, early days of life are buoyed by forces of love in the world, internal or external. I also hope our Palestenian and Israeli brothers and sisters suffering so intensely in this moment can find a faith in love and human divinity in a world that sometimes appears to be Godless.

I know that if I am ever in those circumstances, trapped in a war zone or imprisoned, it is my children’s sweet faces I will imagine. And they will protect me – my mind, if not my body – from the terrors of the world. In this way, love is God and God is love. And God is, indeed, near, this Christmas.