Question: I think I heard you
say recently that there are things God can’t do. Isn’t God
omnipotent?
Answer: That’s the question
that people have wrestled with forever. If God is all powerful, then why doesn’t
God fix everything that is wrong, especially when faithful people ask God to do
so? The conclusion is often something like this: If God is all powerful, God
isn’t necessarily all-good; and, if God is all-good, then God must not be all
powerful.
I would prefer a God
that is all-good but that can’t necessarily do all things (for instance, God
apparently can’t override an individual’s will, God doesn’t seem able to prevent
natural disasters, God can’t rig elections or lotteries or sporting contests,
etc.) to a God that could do all things but for some unknown reason chooses to
not heal all the brokenness in the world.
A book that disturbed
me and helped me (those ideas that threaten our preconceived notions often prove
to be the most helpful) in the early 90s was Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
Kushner’s conclusion is that God is good but unable to do everything, which for
him is preferable to the idea of a God who can do everything but chooses to
allow good people to suffer anyway.
The word compassion
means “to suffer with”…I believe God is infinite compassion, that is, God is
with us in our trials, blessing us with ideas, with opportunities to make
friends and summon hope and courage from our own depths, sharing our tears and
our laughter, nudging us to do all we can for ourselves and for one another, and
in the process we discover we are as resilient as we are fragile, that miracles
are possible but they aren’t forced on us (or denied us) from on high, but are
the result of our own choices, thoughts, attitudes, and
actions.
I believe in prayer.
It focuses us and reminds us of our connection to all life and to the Source of
life. It lifts us up beyond despair and then we are able to see and seize many
more opportunities and possibilities than we considered before. But prayer
isn’t, for me, begging God to do what God wouldn’t do without our begging, and
might refuse to do anyway. That is neither a powerful understanding of prayer
nor a flattering understanding of God.
Rather than thinking
of God as omnipotent, I tend to think
of God as omnipotence. Rather than
being a separate being that is all-powerful, God for me is All Power but can
only do for us what It does through us.
It’s rather like any
of the natural laws that once we understood them and learned to cooperate with
them allowed us then to do the previously believed impossible (organ
transplants, flight, space travel, instant global communication, etc.). The
power to do these things has always existed, but we never benefited from it
until we learned how to cooperate with it. The power needed us to be able to
help us.
Prayer helps me tap
into divine power, and then I can learn to direct that power more and more
beneficially, but never in this process is my own responsibility for my life
taken from me.
Middle Ages Christian
mystic Meister Eckhart said, “Prayer helps us turn within to that power and presence, to commune
with it and cooperate with it. But that is different than something beyond us
denying our wishes or occasionally granting them. I really believe that what God
does for us, God does through us. Our hands are God’s hands and the most
powerful answer to prayer is when we let ourselves be our own answers to our
prayers.
Jewish theologian
Abraham Heschel wisely taught, “
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