Asking Why. God's Justice in Pastoral Care (original) (raw)

2018, Beate Ego/Ute Gause/Ron Margonlin/Dalit Rom-Shiloni (Hrsg.), Theodicy and Protest. Jewish and Christian Perspectives

Experiences of contingency can break into our lives in an extremely painful manner. If serious suffering or an unexpected catastrophe hits us, we are forced to ponder on our lives. Priorities are sorted through anew, and the question is asked: Why are we standing where we are standing, why have we become the way we are, why does that which is happening happen to us? It is the function of religion to take on such experiences of contingency. Religion doesn't work on contingency through acting or deciding as, for example, in the medical system, but by thematizing contingency itself. Thereby religion too, to be sure, doesn't offer any easy answers. Religion awakens much more the consciousness not for the knowable, not for the calculable, but for the fundamental doubt that accompanies faith. Pastors are challenged in a special way to withstand the indefinite and undefinable and not to explain them away rationally. The unexplainable, that which remains ambivalent, is not the end of communication for them, but its beginning. I will illustrate this with the following pastoral care example.' Ms. Hedinger is a 57 year-old woman who knows that she will soon die of cancer. When Reverend Hagmiiller visits her in the hospital she soon signals at the beginning of the conversation that she has a need for discussion. Ms. Hedinger begins to tell the pastor about all the misery that she has become aware of recently on television-refugee camps, fleeing hungry children and so forth. Then she says, and I quote: »There the question arose why God would allow such horrible things to happen. That ! am sick and will perhaps die is in the final analysis a small individual thing. Not important. But what is taking place there, for thousands of people: that shouts to heaven. Is there a divine governance of the world? How do you view that?« Rev. Hagmiiller is wise enough not to answer the question directly. He cautiously The example is found in flans van der Geest,