“If God is so caring and great, why is there suffering in life?”
This thought came to my mind last week after hearing that the 2-year-old son of a famous NFL running back was tragically killed. I once read that unlike other family deaths — for example, a wife without her husband is called a widow — there is no word for a parent who loses a child. The pain is too much.
But we don’t need to lose a child to understand suffering. Everyone knows that misery and hardships, at some level, interrupt our otherwise pleasant lives. In our moments of gloom, an age-old question pops up: We wonder how God, who claims to be both powerful and generous, lets innocent people suffer.
This question, more relevant today than ever, has long puzzled most religions. Rarely is Islam, my faith tradition, part of this discussion, so let me share an insight Islam offers on this mystery of life.
One sentence appears at the start of each chapter in the Quran: “In the name of God, Most Merciful and Most Compassionate.”
These words are said to contain the secret of life: The divine mercy encompasses and penetrates into “everything in the cosmos, this world and the next,” as the American Muslim theologian Nuh Keller explains.
Islam uniquely emphasizes the concept of “journeying.” Our souls, the essence of our being, are on a timeless journey. Descending to this world, the soul uses a human body as its vehicle for a few decades. After becoming clinically dead, we go onto the next life — an eternal one.
Having the big picture always helps. America’s best-selling poet Rumi tells us of an ant that is creeping across a mosque carpet and gets pissed off by the obstacle course of “bumps, and strange colours, and patterns.”
In contrast, the carpet maker, looking from above, appreciates how the patterns beautifully come together.
We are like the frustrated ant when we forget we dwell on Earth very briefly. Only in seeing the larger picture — the next few decades being a test of how we choose to use the seeds of our individual talents and the next life being the harvest of our struggles — can we find inner peace amid life’s bleakness.
An overwhelming calm comes when you realize that although “the arc of the moral universe is long,” it eventually bends toward justice and that our human journeys don’t end in this world. There is no need to be impulsively hopeless whenever s**t happens. After all, the universe is in the hands of the all-knowing, with the divine mercy simply asking for our patience.
But being naive is no option.
Sure, we should try to actualize these mental abstractions through a nonjudgmental attitude concerning God, but remember, there is no grand escape from pain.
Take the poet James Lowell, who was devastated when his baby daughter died. Despite recognizing the “perfect” logic of eternity, he said, “Not all the preaching since Adam has made Death other than Death.”
As a Muslim, it’s easy to overlook the anguish of the Prophet Muhammad — someone who buried 14 of his own children. When his son passed away, he held the child in his arms and began to weep.
The prophet’s last words to the lifeless infant are deeply edifying: “My little son, I have no ownership over you from God ... Tears flow from the eyes, the heart is plunged in sorrow, but the tongue shall speak only that which does not displease God.”
Zulkar Khan is a UF microbiology senior. His column runs on Wednesdays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 10/16/2013 under the headline "The God mystery: Is He just chilling?"
