April 9: WARNING--contains religious content!!!

Have PrimeTime on in the background with the professor who is getting (justified) attention regarding his life lessons offered with impending death. For those who have read this regularly, you will recognize that he and I express many similar feelings: 1) You don't have control over the hand you are dealt 2) The only thing you have total control over is how you chose to re-act to the situation 3) Don't wait to do things you have always wanted to do 4) Anger wastes a lot of energy and doesn't accomplish anything 5) There is humor in anything and everything. (I hope that there is some major guilt out there for not having sent this blog to Oprah, Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters before this guy said the same things!)

The standard Judeo-Christian way of looking at things is that God has a plan, everything that happens to us is part of God's plan. If bad things are happening to you it means that you are either being punished or supposed to learn something. Even recently, with the co-worker saying that I had to have a third heart surgery because I hadn't learned what I was supposed to after the first two. Doesn't that sound harsh? But it was a view that I shared, taking it even further with my belief in reincarnation, which opened up entire vistas of previous lives that I could be punished for. But I stayed with the "everything has a reason" philosophy through the second heart surgery and horrid lung surgery. Right up until I heard the words "You need a third heart surgery...." Because I just couldn't accept that I had done anything, in this life or a prior one, to merit this much punishment.

But, outside of my issues for a moment, let's apply that philosophy to the rest of the world. Were the thousands of people who were hurt/killed/lost everything in New Orleans all being punished for something? Some evangelists and Muslims have said yes, that it was a "sin city" and therefore deserved the destruction. Does that sound a little like Sodom and Gommorah from the Old Testament? Humm.... OK, let's look a bit further: all the people, including children, who have endured almost constant war and strife for decades in the Middle East. Well, it is about religion. Who is right? Whose interpretation of God's word is more correct than the others? And do all those children who have been born in the last 100 centuries do something to deserve being born into a constant turmoil?

OK, here's the motherlode: Do all the millions of children and adults in Africa do something to deserve being born poor, starving and infected with HIV? Can you really believe that God really wants all of them to be punished for their prior sins? And if you do believe that, do you really want to love a God that would do that? Or are you just scared not to?

So, here it comes: What if there is no plan? What if God doesn't have control over what happens to you, good or bad? What if NO ONE is in charge?? YIKES!!! One of the reasons I left the Episcopal Church as a teen was that I couldn't accept the teaching that God already knew everything we were ever going to do or think in our entire lives. Why give us brains if s/he didn't want us to use them, to have free will?

So, here comes the philosophy of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People": What if God doesn't control things? What if s/he isn't punishing us or trying to teach us by the adversity in our lives, but is there to turn to for comfort, strength and guidance? What if bad things happen to us because there is good and bad in the world and some of us get more of the bad? My heart was doomed from, literally, embryonic stage if not conception. (Ick, have to think of parents and sex--yuck, yuck, yuck!) And if I believe that God "did that" to me, how could I love such a monster? Because the God I believe in couldn't be that mean. Parents: they're meant to punish you when you do something wrong. God: S/He is love.

On that exceptionally philosophical note, I must return to the prosaic and feed four hungry cats and go to bed.

Thanks for checking in, Laurie