wordsout by godfrey rust
The
sailing of the ark < 15
of 45 >
15
And
still there is the old familiar puzzle:
how can he be omnipotent and good?
Did
he
use his power to manufacture evil?
Or have the will, but lack the means to stop it?
Or
if, as
it must be, neither can be true,
how should we comprehend this suffering God
who
kills
us with his endless loving-kindness? The
question has
defeated the best minds that he made: this dreadful
love
laid
out
the context for its own rejection, gave
to its beloved the gift of doubt, and mental tools
to
fashion arguments to justify it; and then stood back,
watching as into the vacuum of its withdrawal
sin
rushed like a wind, a kinetic power
as insubstantial as a hurricane.
An
account
of the most
troublesome paradox of all: the existence of evil under an
all-powerful,
perfect God.
endless
loving-kindness
cf
Jeremiah 31:3.
as insubstantial as a hurricane Sin must in some sense be a “negative” entity, as it is not a creation of God and cannot be a creation of anyone else, so I find the analogy of “wind” - which has immense power but no substance - helpful. I am encouraged in this view of the nature of sin by Karl Barth’s translation of the “chaos” in Genesis 1 as “the shadow of reality”.
Much of this sonnet (along with sonnet 14) was used in adapted form in the lyrics of Healing Touch (The Theologian's Prayer) on my album Prayers in Time.