Beyond Heaven and Earth

by Steven H. Propp

  And don’t tell me that “I need to listen to your followers here on Earth”; I’ve gotten so goddam much unwanted theological advice since Sophia’s death it makes me want to puke, right in their faces. “Maybe God needed Sophia more than we did.” When one of Sophia’s friends told me that at her funeral, I felt like smashing him in the face. An infinitely powerful God doesn’t “need” anything or anyone. How could God possibly need my parents more than my sister and I needed them? How could God have needed Sophia more than I needed her? And even apart from me, what about Sophia’s parents? Her siblings? Her students at school? How could anyone in the entire universe have needed Sophia more than we do?

  There is no power that will ever convince me that I didn’t need Sophia more than life itself. Without her, I’m lost, just a broken shard of a man; my life is a shambles. There’s nothing “positive” left inside of me: no feelings, no passion— just emptiness, bitterness, anger, and hurt.

  “God is testing your faith,” they tell me. Right. The all-powerful, omniscient God doesn’t know what level of faith I have without killing my wife and son. (Well, now that he’s found out, why doesn’t he give her back to me?) Besides, why would God need to “test” our faith, anyway? Isn’t he supposed to be able to know all things in advance? Furthermore, what kind of a “test” is this? Would God have brought back Sophia to me if I “passed” the test? Of course not; pass or fail, Sophia and our son are gone. Never again in this world will I see Sophia, and that is the only remaining certainly in life, which I know with absolute assurance.

  “God is speaking to you through this tragedy. He is trying to teach you some lesson.” Then what is the lesson? No one can tell me what it is. If God wants to teach me something, then why doesn’t he answer my prayers? Why doesn’t he give me some reassurance? Why doesn’t he give me some minuscule, ray of fucking hope?

  People try and claim that there is some sort of underlying “purpose” when a disaster happens, but that’s ridiculous. Are they really claiming that when an airliner crashes, that God somehow timed everything so that the families of all these dead people “needed to have their faith tested” at precisely the same time? That when civilians are killed by a terrorist’s bomb it’s because “God needed all of them more than we did”? Or that when people die in an earthquake, that this was somehow coordinated so that the ones who died were all giving their families a “life lesson” at the same time? That’s absurd.

  “Suffering is used of God to teach us something; Christians are made perfect through suffering. God often uses evil or sad events to bring about good, and God can use this tragic event to make you a better person. Furthermore, pain provides us with the opportunity to demonstrate virtue, even at a heroic level. Through your steadfast faith, you can serve as a witness to others, and help bring them to salvation.” This is nothing more than what the psychologists I studied in school call displacement; that is, trying to blame me for what God did. If I haven’t turned out to be a “hero” like you wanted, God, well then I’m just sorry as hell. I hope you’re prepared to deal with the results if it turns out—as seems likely right now—that this particular event turns me completely away from you, for good

  They tell me, “God is trying to teach you to trust him, and not to lean on your own understanding.” But “trust” is a two-way street: in order to deserve trust, you have to earn it. To expect us to trust a being that only is showing us disaster and pain is foolish. I’m more than willing to trust God’s way of doing things, if only he would tell me why he is doing them. Yes, I know the Bible says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” (Isa 55:8) So you, God, establish a Church in the world, that claims to have sufficient inspiration and guidance from you that it feels confident in telling a married couple that they cannot use birth control; that a gay person must remain celibate; that abortion is murder; that we must worship every Sunday, and that we must generously support this Church financially. But this supposed “godly” institution can’t even give me a good reason for why you would take the life of my wife and son?

  But not everyone says stupid, thoughtless things. One sweet lady (who was always friendly to me at Mass) told me, “At the human level, we feel that Sophia is dead, but that isn’t really true; there is no such thing as death. Don’t worry about Sophia now, Jobran, because she is now closer to God, Jesus and Mary than any of us are. She is better off now, beyond the sorrows of this present world.” I hope and pray that it is so. If it isn’t…well, I just don’t know what to think.

  Actually, I do know what to think—and I think that there is absolutely no way that Sophia is “better off” by having been taken from us so prematurely. She loved children so much, yet she will never know the inexpressible joy of tenderly holding her own newborn child on her bosom for the first time. She will never hear his first words, or hear him cry out “Mama!” when he is hurt or frightened, and be able to soothe and comfort him. She will never be able to teach him how to crawl, or to walk. She will never be able to read him a story at bedtime, or play games, or fingerpaint with him. She will never spend a Saturday afternoon with her son at the park, or the swimming pool, or the movies. She won’t be able to fill his room with silly stuffed animals, or have birthday and Christmas celebrations with him. She will never be able to sit up with him all night when he’s sick or hurting, she will never be able to whisper reassuring words to him or rock him to sleep. Her eyes will never swell with tears of joy and pride as she sees her son graduate from school. She will never see him find a career, or establish a home of his own. She will never be able to see him fall in love himself, or get married in the Church. She will never be able to console and share secrets with her daughterin-law. She will never know what it’s like to be a “Grandmama,” and have all the family gather around her for a birthday celebration. All she will be able to do for the rest of eternity (according to Dante) is sit around in a circle and contemplate your glory. Sounds exciting.

  God, it just doesn’t make any fucking sense. If this life is only for the purpose of determining whether or not we achieve eternity, then why go through with it at all? Being omnipotent, don’t you already know how things are going to turn out? If you know the future—including whether we will end up in Heaven or Hell—why don’t you just send us straight there? Why bother even going through the charade of earthly life? Why not just pick out the people that you want surrounding you in eternity, and forget going through the rest of the process? Surely you don’t think that you have to “prove” anything to anybody by going through the entire procedure? What—is Satan going to file a Cosmic Grievance against you, if you don’t “go through the motions”? Is there some cosmic Court of Appeal that might overrule your decision if you don’t “follow through” with it?

  For that matter, why are the lifespans of people so unequal, with some people living for one hundred years, and others—such as our baby—not even making it to the time of birth? If we are supposed to live on this earth in order to learn something unique, why does our allotted time vary so much from person to person? How can some people (presumably) “learn all they need to learn from life” and die at age four, when others apparently need to live for 100 years? Why are some people like Sophia killed off when they’ve hardly even begun their lives, while others don’t die until their existence is a burden to themselves, not to mention others? For that matter, why are some people allowed to linger on in states of illness, suffering mental and physical distress? Wouldn’t it be more merciful if you just let them die—particularly when you already know what their “eternal destiny” will be anyway? If they are going to Heaven, then why not let them go ahead and go there, rather than lingering on for months and years in hospital beds, bankrupting their families? What’s the purpose of prolonging their earthly sufferings, particularly if they are just going to have to go through Purgatory to be “purified” anyway? Why not let them get a “head start” in being purified?

>   And a lot of the people who live to a ripe old age aren’t good, loving persons like Sophia: they’re evil, heartless old bastards, who would drive over their own mother to achieve their ends. They steal from corporations to line their own pockets, then leave the workers and stockholders holding the bag while they retire to a mansion on the beach. Why do you let them live, while you let Sophia die? Psalm 37:25 says, “I have never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread,” but that is total bullshit—David didn’t know what he was talking about. It happens all the time that the wicked prosper, while “the good die young.”

  Several people have told me, “You should be grateful that Sophia died as quickly as she did; it would have been worse, if her suffering had been drawn-out, and protracted.” Other people tell me, “You should be glad that the baby died so early in pregnancy. It would have been even harder on you if you’d gotten attached to it throughout the entire cycle of pregnancy, and then it had been stillborn, for example. Or if you’d had to choose between saving the life of the baby, or saving the life of Sophia.” Well, I am grateful for those things, in a sense; but it’s impossible to feel “glad” over a tragedy just because the tragedy could have been even worse. Would we expect a woman who was raped by some sadist to feel “glad” that she wasn’t raped twice? How can a person that has just been smashed in the face feel “grateful” that he wasn’t smashed even harder? I would feel gratitude for not having been smashed in the face at all, or for at least being given some valid reason for my pain—but there’s nothing of comfort coming to me from God, obviously.

  And aren’t there people that supposedly “lose their salvation”? If that is the case, why don’t you take their lives as soon as they achieve salvation? Or at least, before they lose their salvation? Why take the risk of letting them live on, when they may end up in Hell? And even if someone is going to be damned to Hell for all of eternity, then why not just get on with it? What difference is another few months or years going to make, when you know what their eternal destiny is anyway?

  Or why don’t we all die when we are babies, since it is generally conceded that infants, even unbaptized ones, are “saved” in some sense? By letting them live on, all you are doing is increasing their chances of damnation. And if babies aren’t saved, what does that say about your sense of fairness? Our little son hadn’t even been born—what possible “sins” could he have committed? If you won’t even grant salvation to someone as innocent as he was, then what kind of “justice” is this system that you have?

  It’s the arbitrariness of life that is so unendurable. Although the doctors claim that there was nothing they could have done, the cardiac arrest that killed Sophia would probably have been curable if we had been rich and able to keep her in a first-class hospital, or to fly in the finest specialists in the world to see her. (For a rich patient, they wouldn’t have assumed that “It’s just one of those early-pregnancy things”; they would have done extensive tests on her, and rushed the results to the lab. They would have interviewed her parents extensively, and found out about the history of heart disease on her mother’s side of the family.) They would have put her in the Intensive Care Unit, not in the “general population,” and closely monitored her. But since we were just regular, middle class teachers and not members of the privileged classes, Sophia died.

  Is that the way it is? “Them that’s got, get; them that don’t, lose,” as Billie Holiday sang. The Bible tells us that “money is the root of all evil,” yet if I’d had a bundle of money, my wife would still be alive—and since I didn’t, she’s dead. How is it supposed to be more “blessed” to be poor, then? From what I can tell, the poor don’t seem to be any more “spiritual” than anyone else, nor do the rich use their riches for the sake of others. There is no “merit system,” no measurement on a salary schedule to determine one’s “worthiness” for having wealth— you’ve either got money, or you don’t. If you’ve got money, you can throw your life away at parties, commit adultery and homosexuality with impunity, get hooked on drink and drugs, and it doesn’t make any difference; in the final analysis, you’re still rich, and the best of what this world has to offer is still yours for the taking. Whereas if you’re poor, you’re fucked.

  We humans try to persuade ourselves that “nothing happens without a purpose,” but I think that deep down, we know that’s all wishful thinking—it’s pure bullshit. Things happen all the time for which there is no good purpose; we only try to dream up a “purpose” for things after the facts, to rationalize events to ourselves. But the reality is, that things apparently either happen for bad reasons, or they seemingly “just happen” for no reason whatsoever. “Shit happens,” as the saying goes, and that’s all that life is: Shit.

  Even if I didn’t have the clear example of Sophia staring me in the face, I could look at the history of the world, particularly in the last hundred years or so, and see that there is obviously no “all-loving” God that is watching over the world. Did the millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust—probably calling out to God in fervent prayer all the time—hear anything from him? No, of course not. Whether it’s murder on a vast panoramic scale, or murder on an individualistic personal scale, it’s got the same result: God just doesn’t give a shit about us. There is nothing like a “plan” or a “purpose” that is underlying events. It’s almost as if we were simply placed here on this planet without any pretense of it being under some form of “Divine Providence.” Everything is just random, and that’s all. Einstein was wrong—God does “play dice with the universe”; and if your number doesn’t come up, then you’ve just crapped out, and you’re out of the game, forever.

  People tell me that I should “just be grateful for all the good times that you had with Sophia.” And I am, eternally so; the precious memories of our love are my one and only tiny ray of light in all of this surrounding darkness. But it seems like every momentary bit of happiness we have in life is invariably outweighed by the tremendous pain and heartbreak that lies waiting for us, just around the next corner. God, it’s almost as if you’re setting us up, just to make the inevitable pain even worse. Sure, there are times that seem “happy” to us. But I’m sure that there are also times that seem happy to a pig when it’s wallowing in a slop hole, waiting to be slaughtered; the only difference is that the pig doesn’t know it’s going to be slaughtered once it’s fat enough, whereas we do—so thanks a hell of a lot for giving us that insight, God.

  In our lives, there is never a “good” without a corresponding “bad.” Even in our greatest moments of exaltation, there is always the thought underlying it, “Why can’t this feeling go on forever? Why can’t I just capture this moment, so that it will last?” But we know that it can’t—every good which we experience comes to an end, only too soon. Even in the midst of experiencing them, they are often unsatisfying in many respects: something we’d looked forward to all our lives— marriage, children, security—never comes to pass, whereas an event we have anticipated for months or years turns out to be disappointing, frustrating, and unsatisfying.

  The preachers try and tell us that “God is working out everything according to his purpose,” but that is utter nonsense. How can Hitler and the Holocaust, Stalin and the Gulag, the threat of atomic warfare, the specter of international terrorism, and other nightmares of our times be working toward some “good” purpose? Why are we expected to sacrifice our lives for the sake of someone else’s “good”? Do you think that the victims of all these tragedies would agree that it was “worth it”?

  We tend to want to give God the “credit” when good things happen, but we avoid giving him the blame when bad things happen. That’s not right; we should be even-handed in this: If he gets the credit, then he should also get the blame. Or some people try and attribute all of the bad things in the world to someone like Satan. But who is it that created Satan in the first place? Wasn’t it God who created him; the same God who is supposed to
have “foreknowledge” of future events, including the actions of Satan? Why would you have created Satan, if you could foresee that he would create all the havoc that he supposedly creates? Who is it that allowed him to live in the courts of Heaven in the first place, and that permitted him to gather an army of angels and rebel? And who is it that allows him to live on now, and cause unending problems for us on Earth? Who is it that permits him to roam the earth “like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour”? (1 Pet 5:8) Who was it that permitted him to afflict Job, and kill all his children? There’s only one being that has that kind of power, and that’s the same being we’re trying to give only the “credit” to: God. Unless you posit some sort of “dualistic” system—where there are two basically equal forces that run the universe—then Satan is ultimately the agent of God—there’s no way around it. Maybe God just uses Satan to “keep his hands clean,” so to speak; to do the dirty work that He doesn’t want to sully his reputation with. Let me ask this: If Jesus Christ is now supposedly “sitting at the right hand of God,” then who is sitting at God’s left hand? (The devil, maybe?) Sounds to me like they are both agents of God, but performing different aspects of his will.

  People tell me, “You need to read God’s Word, the Bible. In this difficult time; it will comfort you,” but that’s a crock. They told me to first read the twenty-third Psalm—which was read at every funeral I ever went to as a Protestant—and I remember it saying, “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” So I pulled Sophia’s New American Bible off the shelf to read it, and found out that it doesn’t even say “forever”—it says, “for years to come.” I couldn’t believe it; so I went to the bookstore at the mall, and compared half-a-dozen modern translations, and they all say the same thing. It’s not talking about eternal life, or Heaven, or anything like that; it’s just saying that the Psalmist will experience goodness and mercy during his own lifetime. (Then after that, what? Probably nothing.)