Re: Miracles and angels

[barbara wolf <lupa@biddeford.com>]

Denis Paz writes:>
>The problem with this explanation, [to previous post that posited human
awareness of angelic presence as "reason" why some are spared] as I see it,
is that it blames the
>victim. I know some parents whose daughter was struck and killed by a
>drunk driver while walking down a street. Why did the guardian angel
>not intervene? Why did no miracle occur? This explanation says,
>because the daughter "in effect" rejected the help because she did
>not hear or did not act on what she heard.

I suppose the real thorny part here is that we are indeed looking for
explanations in the department of Cause and Effect.  Why this person, rather
than that? And then of course we are bound to start looking for Causes.  Is
God (or a lazy guardian angel) simply not around at the right time?  Is He
playing favorites--and if so, how does one get to be a favorite?  I also am
interested that Denis gets to the issue of "blame"--and it's altogether too
easy to blame victims, as he pointed out.  But I think the connection is
inevitible, IF we let ourselves in for the cause/effect sequence in our
response to suffering.  There was another post (I have it in another
mailbox) having to do with the random character of creation.  Just because
so many terrible things seem to happen *at random*, for no apparent reason
at all, our cause/effect searches are doomed at the start.  And yet we go on
doing them.

I am still convinced that the WHY question is not the really basic one.  The
really basic question is, "How am I to go on living, now that this has
happened?"  Because even if we did get nice tidy answers to "Why did God let
this happen? or "Why didn't he provice a miracle for me?" we would not
necessarily find ease for the pain.

Indeed, it does seem to me that the Mighty Acts of God can steer us to the
problem of going on, in the midst of real anguish. God's promise here is
that there is resurrection and new life in all that random, terrible pain.
(And I'm not talking here about the person who was killed going to God.  I'm
talking about the rest of us, helplessly watching irrational, senseless
suffering.)  I sometimes think we can drive ourselves bonkers quite
needlessly.  We were never promised freedom from death, or freedom from
suffering either.  We have been promised resurrection from death--and God
indeed knows that we suffer all kinds of deaths.

Barbara Wolf