My Parent's Dark Secrets
Reflection on the Reality of Sin
Wanna know what my parents’ deep-dark secret is? Hold your precious little hats…they were normal, at times sinful, humans. I know, I know, that may be hard for some who knew my folks, well, not for those who knew my dad!
A part of my faith flourishing has been allowing the pain of their deaths to serve God’s bigger purpose of my becoming who I am created to be. You might have in your mind a scripture where the technicolor dream-coated one, Joseph, told his brothers when they came to Egypt with their tails between their legs in Genesis 50:20 (ESV):
As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.
To reiterate what I alluded to about my theological framing of traumatic events, like the death of loved ones, I do not believe it is biblical, based in reality, or aligned with the Tradition of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church to believe that God caused the death of my parents so that He could bring some good out of it. I have no interest in submitting my whole life to a god like that. Imagine fleshing that garbage theology out… the core faulty premise is that God causes (wills) bad things to happen, so let’s say every sexual assault that occurs today in the United States was caused by a god… There are about 1,270 sexual assaults committed every day in the United States alone (I believe this number is reasonable based on my reading of statistical analysis by experts who do it for a living). So 1,270 people are sexually assaulted every day in our country alone, and if you spill the math, that’s 453,550 people sexually assaulted every year in the good ‘ol USA. Do we really believe that the one God of the universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, caused or willed this to happen? I think not! And that god is a monster worth burning along with the pile of rubbish.
My current plan is to post on Mondays and Thursdays. I’ll reflect more this Thursday on my parents’ normal human sinfulness and how it impacts my life today as a disciple of Christ driven to honor Him as a member of His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in the real world as a normal 52-year-old male sinner who can’t seem to stop eating even when he is full.
