The Divine Playwright.

[jackofallgeeks]

So I was talking to Cindy today. And at one point she mentioned having a discussion about depression with one of her other friends, and her friends said, "you know why you get depressed? Because you're not doing God's Will. Because there's something you should be doing and you're not." And Cindy's reply was, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Duh."

And I was thinking, "No. No it doesn't."

And this highlights a significant difference between myself and a good number of the people who go to Steubenville and Christendom and the like. Put simply, I don't have 'practical' faith, for lack of a better word. Maybe 'trust in God,' is better. I believe in God and Jesus and the Resurrection, Heaven and Hell and salvation. I believe that God has made us for a purpose and generally has our best in mind.

But from there I get a bit Deistic. At the end of the day, it's what you do with your life that matters. I don't believe God has every day of our lives, yet alone every action, scripted out from here until eternity. I don't even believe that God will guarantee your life will be as it ought to be: people fail. People are miserable. It happens.

What I really don't like about the above, "you get depressed because you aren't doung God's Will," it that t leads itself so easily to being over-scrupulous about things. How can you know God's Will? Can can you be sure you're doing it? If you're depressed, but you've been doing everything 'right,' then what?

I do believe in God, and that we have a purpose, and I'm even pretty sure that he does take a hand in things now and again -- I don't think he's just watching his clockwork reality wind down. But I also don't think we're meant to run like robots according to some divine script we aren't allowed to read. You get depressed because there are sad things you can't get over, or because stress is tearing at you, or because you're biologic chemistry is off. Life is ambiguous. The best you can do is to do the best you know. To be a good person and do what's right, as well as you can with what you have and know.

As for my lack of faith, which I do think is a failing in certain respects, we can discuss that another time.

Comments

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

This is all true. Having faith can be a good thing; a study found that believing in "one true-love" or a soulmate (something else I don't believe in) makes breakups easier because "it wasn't meant to be." And I do consider my lack of faith to be something of a failing, as noted above.

I think it's rather arrogant and presumptuous to imagine that anyone can really know even the smallest part of God's plan. Perhaps we can make educated guesses -- I'd be really surprised if I wasn't meant to have a family -- but more often than not I can't be sure of what I intend, let alone what He might. And it very well may be that my strong desire to have a family is just another tool by which someone else's life is impacted for the better; that I have a family of my own or not may be immaterial, or it may be that I'm best with the abstract notion of a family and putting that in perspective for others rather than having one of my own, and all the practical stickiness that entails. (I don't really believe that, but I wouldn't really be surprised if I was surprised).

You know Cruxshadows, right? You know the song "Helen"? There's a mix of it (on Shadowbox or something) with the line "Everything in life has a purpose, everything you do has meaning in the world. everything in life has a purpose; sometimes that purpose is somebody else." I think that's something to really sit and think about.

And really? I think what bothers me most about the Divine playwright idea is that it pretty much denies human free will. I mean, I guess it doesn't, but it turns it from being actual free will into a kind of passive-aggressive divine coercion. "Oh, sure, you can do whatever you want, but if you don't play by my rules, well, let's just say you won't be happy." Momentarily putting aside philosophical arguments about what 'happy' means, 'good' people can be miserable, and 'bad' people can be happy. Even the Bible, should we resort to that, has the story a Job, a man who did everything 'right' but who had a miserable life -- arguably because if he hadn't had a miserable life he wouldn't have had the opportunity to do everything right, but that bit is my own speculation.

The world is much more complicated and complex than black and white. I do think that, in the end, He does what's best for us, even though that may very often not be what we want, or think we want, or whatever.

I think I'm rambling.