Louisville Process Theology Network

Guilt I

Nov 21, 2007

What are we to do when we see extreme poverty?

A friend of mine told me a few months ago that she had recently accompanied a group of college students on an immersion trip to a Church-operated mission in Central America. She was expecting the trip to be eye-opening and challenging, but also found it discouraging.

She said many of the students returned angry, frustrated, and feeling guilty. What are we to do with these feelings? she wondered.

Maybe the answer to this predicament is simpler than we think.

For process theologian Norman Pittenger, religious faith is "a call to action and part of that action is for us to serve God as God's agents in overcoming evil wherever we see it and to work with God for creation to be more effectively realized."

Pittenger adds tha we need to "reconcile these appalling facts (of evil in the world) with the belief that God is good and caring."

He writes in Becoming and Belonging, "Maybe God does not cause suffering ... Maybe it happens for some other reason than the will of God ...Could it be that God does not cause the bad things that happen to us?

Could it be that he doesn't decide which families will give birth to a handicapped child ...but rather that he stands ready to help them and us cope with tragedies if we could only get beyond the feelings of guilt and anger that separate us from Him?"

Pittenger sees a God who offers the constant possiblity of love, creativity, and goodness even though everything we see is not perfectly accomplished."


(Please forgive the sexist prose. It's obviously out of date.)

To be continued.