A dazzling morning here in the Southern Tier, with clear, slightly hazy skies, the whole place glowing with bright warmth. I took P to work so I could ride over to the airport and pull some numbers off the G1000. I'll use those to order an update to our digital navigation database from Jeppesen a little later this morning. It's hard to have a bad day when it begins sitting in the cockpit of a fine airplane. A little later today, God willing, we will fly to Perry after P gets off work, with a pit stop in North Carolina. The flight planning software says to expect about four-and-a-half hours in the air. Amazing.
Last night over a drink with friend from Guthrie, Peg made an observation that has had me thinking ever since. The storefront window was wide open at Liquid Shoes Brewing Company, and Market Street was alive with folks enjoying a beautiful spring evening.
Out of the earshot of our friend, Peg pondered how we arrived at this moment. "If we'd been getting along three years ago, I never would've found this place."
So true.
That was a dark time for us, in early 2018. Although we'd be married a year later, no one would've guessed it at the time. P decided she needed to avail herself of the opportunity to get out of Panama City and work as a locum tenens somewhere far from wherever I happened to be at that moment. A recruiter pitched an opening at a hospital in Corning, New York. I doubt P could've found the place on a map at the time, although she'd had prior locums gigs in nearby Williamsport and at the Geisinger Medical Center down in Danville. But P's always been sort of an adventurer, and within a few weeks she was credentialed and standing in an operating room at Guthrie, maybe the very one in which she's standing right now as I write this.
Corning has been a blessing to us as a family, and to P professionally. That assignment here in 2018 led to another, and then several others after that. Peg was here when the hurricane destroyed Panama City. She dragged me along when the pandemic shut down operating rooms in north Florida while those that remained open were ravaged by Covid, just in time for an upstate winter. We were stretched and challenged, and fell in love with this place as we fell more in love with each other.
And all from a dark moment in a relationship.
There was a time in my life when I spent a lot of time thinking and praying on the project of developing a personal theology. An examined life leads one to those questions eventually, questions of ultimate purpose and meaning during this high speed pass through life.
I've always been more Aristotlean than Platonic in my approach to theology, figuring that an immanent God reveals herself in creation, and in our human experience. It's a framework that feels right to me, even though it ultimately made my ordained journey a little challenging as I'd roll my eyes at chunks of the Nicene Creed, or Bible verses that say more about the actual author than the deity he (and it's always "he") is treating as a divine ventriloquist's dummy, mouthing the author's own fears, prejudices, and pathologies.
I've also imperfectly tried to filter my theology with a fine strain of humility, reminding myself that I'm not here on earth long enough to know much more than that I don't know much, and that we are only equipped to perceive about 5% of what's all around us.
So, from this blinkered vantage point, I turn to the problem of God's relationship with evil in the world, "theodicy" in seminary-speak. If God is truly the creator of everything, and completely in control, does that mean he owns the evil in the world, as well?
I could cut-and-paste about two dozen verses from scripture that suggest as much.
And yet, how does one reconcile the notion of a benign God with a being that fills the children's cancer wards, and nods approvingly as bombs rain down on Gaza this week?
I guess I'm with Rabbi Kuschner on this one--at the risk of falling into the heresy of dualism (and who gets to decide what constitutes "heresy", anyway?), maybe God isn't in control of those dark places, which existed before the first moment described in Genesis. Maybe creation is expanding into and intermixing with a space that God inherited when He began this exercise, with the dark remnants manifesting themselves as "evil".
Which is not to say that God has no relationship with bad stuff, even if it's not his handiwork.
Back when I wore a clerical collar a couple days a week, I spent more time than most people dealing with folks in crisis---sitting bedside in an ICU next to a child with tubes dangling from every orifice, picking up the shattered remnants of a family suddenly broken, watching a business and a dream shuttered after a hopeful beginning gave way to the cruel realities of the marketplace. And people often wanted to know why this was happening, as if someone taught us that up on the mountain at Sewanee.
I never had a pat answer for that one, although I developed a sense of God's presence and role born of experience over these nearly six decades. God didn't kill a child, or a family, or a business. And for Pete's sake, it's not "God's will" that bad things happen to good people.
So where is God in these dark moments of grief and pain and bewilderment? At work, always at work, if we'll just abide and pay attention. The gift of God, of faith in God, at the very worst of times, is to perceive his penchant for making something good, maybe very good, out of painful situations.
"Behold, I make all things new," Jesus says in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Apocalypse of John ("The Book of Revelations" if you're a fundamentalist Protestant). A new creation, a new Jerusalem, proclaimed by a man who was nailed naked to two boards along a roadside only a few moments before. Life as one big turd blossom, a fragrant bouquet growing out of a pile of shit.
Which returns me to Peg's insight last night on Market Street. The tough times we endured together, then separately, then together ultimately, created the discomfort that led to examination of what really mattered to both of us. Those tough days prodded us to the realization that the only life we (okay, "I"- your author can't speak for Peg here) were meant to live was together, no matter the cost. And it drove Peg north from the Gulf Coast to this lovely little town, a revelation to both of us and the place we'll likely spend more-and-more of what's left of our life together. The easier, softer way would never have led to this moment. From pain, a blessing.
Time to get busy with paying work--I have a long, sort of complicated motion to draft before I crawl into the Columbia for a sunset flight down the eastern seaboard with my favorite person, and her cats.
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