87: the absence of good. Or was it evil?

One of atheism's great arguments against the sort of God-figure that Christians have is that there is evil in the world. God is not good enough or not powerful enough to prevent it.

There have always been Christian counter-arguments, of course. One of these says that evil is simply the absence of good; the sun is hot and bright and if there are places that are dark and cold, then that means that they are far away from the sun. Where there is evil, it is because people have distanced themselves from God.

I won't try to consider the relative merits of these arguments. I think you'll believe the one side or the other depending on which conviction you already have about God, and that this conviction will have a lot to do with what you have experienced in life and what you are afraid of.

But the assertion that evil is the absence of good has been occupying my mind. Do we really perceive reality like this? Do we see health as the absence of disease, or disease as the absence of health? Do we see injustice as the absence of justice, or justice as the absence of injustice?

I almost think that we don't see evil as the absence of good. We don't have a clear enough picture of good to think of it as being much of anything. If "good" does not have a palpable reality, then it is difficult to think of anything being "the absence of good". Evil, on the other hand, seems to be very easy to picture as something.

This is more than one of those "half-empty/half-full" questions. The fact is that evil has a more palpable presence, one that we can feel; "good", in comparison, is ethereal and almost unreal.

Brutality is "something". You experience it with your senses, it causes a reaction in your mind and body. The same with tension. But peace -- well, what is peace? Where do you localize it? Isn't it simply the absence of tension and violence?

I can't tell what comfort is unless I ask myself about discomfort; but I know discomfort without comparing it to comfort. Discomfort can be localized. Maybe the chair I'm sitting in is uncomfortable, and I can tell that because of what I feel in my lower back. Maybe my shoes are uncomfortable, and I can point to the exact place or places on my feet where I feel the discomfort.

But what is a comfortable chair or a comfortable shoe? Where can I point and say, "ahh, feel that comfort right there"? Isn't it that I can search my body for feelings of discomfort, and, in the absence of such feelings, can consider the chair or the shoe comfortable?

When I think about people I love, I have a hard time putting that feeling into any positive terms. What do I mean when I say that I love my parents? I mean, for example, that I miss them, that I'm afraid about bad things happening to them, and that I feel pity and maybe anger when bad things do happen to them.

So we got "absence" (the sense of missing someone), fear, pity and anger. How can this combination of negative emotions define a positive emotion? The positive emotion? Sure, the emotions are directed against the circumstances surrounding my parents, and not against my parents themselves. But that is like defining something by what it is not. It is a negative print. It is like drawing a horse by drawing everything around the horse and leaving the horse shape itself blank. You could, in a sense, say that you've drawn a horse. But your horse's surroundings have far more features than the horse itself.

What is virtue if not the absence of vice? When we say "humility", don't we just mean the absence of pride? When we say "honesty", do we mean something active that has its own presence, or are we talking about that which happens when the active circumstance of "telling lies" is stopped? Is "chastity" something in itself, is it a power or a force or anything tangible at all, or is it just the absence of sex? Sex, deceit, pride -- all these seem real enough. They seem like actual things we can do and have, and not like the absence of something. It is the corresponding virtues that seem like absence, like Arctic air far removed from the burning sun of passion. Sure, the air may be pure, but what does "purity" mean if not the absence of contamination?

But how could I be a Christian for so many years and yet not have any clearer picture of Christian virtues than to picture them as the absence of vices which I have a pretty clear picture of?

It seems that many Christians will argue that evil is the absence of good, but will live as if, in reality, good is simply the absence of evil. I am in the same category, but now that I have realized it, it really bothers me.

86: Evening in Santander

I finished my time at the internet cafe. I walked back through Santander towards the pilgrim shelter. As I passed a cathedral I heard the bells ringing and remembered that it was Sunday and I hadn't been to a church service, but it turned out that the bells were not ringing for Mass. It was late afternoon by now. The other churches I passed were not doing anything for the rest of the day either.

I found a public phone and called my parents. Then I walked back to the pilgrim shelter. There was a shelf there where pilgrims had left things behind. There were tents, portable stoves, and other camping gear. I thought of my guitar and how heavy it had gotten after a few days on the road, even though it had seemed like such a good idea to bring it. I could easily understand why someone might bring camping gear, only to abandon it after half the pilgrimage.

I found some foot balm though. It was supposed to help feet that were worn out from walking. I'm not sure how it was supposed to do that, but I figured that it couldn't hurt to try it out, especially since it came in a small bottle that wouldn't weigh heavily in my backpack.

I ate the "pilgrim's special" in the bar just downstairs from the shelter. To my surprise, I was served by the same two women whom I had met in Somo and had asked about the pilgrim shelter.

It was a large meal for a decent price. There was a large screen television showing the Barcelona game. Later in the evening, Anabel showed up in the restaurant as well.

85: The Underachiever, Part 3

For some of us, disappointment is pretty much the greatest pain in life.

Such people are frequently called "pessimists". Our fear of having our hopes dashed makes us wary of having hope at all. We prefer to imagine things to be as bad as they could possibly be, thereby leaving the door open to pleasant surprises but closed to disappointment.

Why do some people achieve a lot less than we think their potential would allow them to? Isn't it because where there is potential there are expectations, and where there are expectations there is a great possibility of disappointment?

People have told me not to fear disappointment so much, but I don't know how that is done. Our fears are usually not so rational that we can simply decide not to have them any more. And that goes for the fears that we know are irrational. How much more for the fears that have a basis in actual experience? The fear of dogs for someone who has never gotten close to a dog is different from the fear of dogs for someone who has been bitten.

It seems to me that the first step in conquering a fear of disappointment would be to learn that disappointment isn't so bad, and that getting your hopes up about things can actually be rewarding.

No doubt there are people whose life experience confirms this, but for some of us it takes great faith to believe that hoping for things is better than not hoping for them. To me it seems that whenever I hope for something (and I mean "hope" in the sense that I have a strong emotional investment in the outcome), I get punished for that hope by having it hurt me.

This is not a good way to train someone in the virtue of hope. It's a way to condition someone to be wary of hope.

Now I don't want to complain about the disappointments in my life, because no doubt it is a very minor pain compared to the sufferings that others have to go through. But even a mild electric shock is an unpleasant enough experience that it can make you avoid certain behavioral patterns that unleash it. Especially if the shock is not accompanied by some worthwhile reward.

As far as I can see, hope sucks. I have a hard time seeing how it is one of the great Christian virtues.

84: Santander

I did not end up eating at McDonald's. I did, however, look up a place with an internet connection. It was a ways away from the pilgrim shelter, which gave me an opportunity to walk through Santander for a bit.

What's wrong with me, I thought. My first priority is always to find an internet connection. Maybe I need to feel that I can still have contact with my friends?

Lone was at one of the computers in the call center. Ha, I thought. This is practically the biggest city I'll visit on this whole trip, and even here I keep bumping into the same two or three people I already know.

I wrote this blog entry. I had realized in my ponderings of what I wanted to do with my life that I was most alive when I was on the road. I no longer really believed that I could make a lifestyle of this, and I was afraid that if I could I would start hating it someday. But I had noticed that it was in my travels that my life seemed most worthwhile. I remembered hitch hiking trips, and prolonged hikes, and visits to faraway friends, as being the times when I came closest to really wanting to live.

It sort of scared me.

83: So what do I want?

In my teens I often considered going for a career in music. I played the piano quite well.

But I think I sort of despised the idea of ending up somewhere in between. There are few careers in music unless you "make it big". I often wondered about those who just ended up teaching somewhere. Did their ambitions desert them? Was their potential not enough? Or was their love primarily for teaching, rather than for music?

All three of these possible explanations depressed me. I knew that, realistically, I couldn't expect to get much further myself.

Looking back, I'm not sure what my standard response to that was. I remember that sometimes I was in a state of denial, assuring myself that I would in fact play the world's great stages someday. Other times I looked more towards a vagabond existence in which I'd travel the world, keeping music as a hobby but never really an ambition.

It must have been clear to me that neither of these goals was realistic. So what was my realistic portrayal of my future?

I'm not sure. But I do think that I got suspicious of taking any of my dreams or ambitions too seriously. They were doomed to fail, so it made more sense to not get emotionally attached to them.

If there is one word that summarizes what I have wanted most consistently in my life, that word would have to be "impermeability". I wanted to be out of reach of disappointment. I knew I could never be spared pain or injustice, but I thought that maybe I could become immune to it. At the very least, I could minimize it. And the best way to minimize the potential for disappointment is to expect nothing good to come your way. I am suspicious of my dreams. I am afraid of falling in love. I am afraid of having a lot to lose. I have always been sure that I will in fact lose everything, and have always tried to minimize what I am attached to.

I failed. In spite of my efforts, I did have hopes and expectations. And they were shattered.

I sort of saw my remaining decades of being alive as one long quest to remain as emotionally detached as possible. I expected everything that I became attached to to be taken away. The problem was not in things being taken away from me; the problem was in me being attached to them. You can take everything from me if I don't care whether I have it or not. That's what I wanted to become.

This wasn't working either. In spite of my efforts, I keep being emotionally attached to things. I keep having hopes and expectations. It sets me up for disappointment and pain and all sorts of nasty stuff.

What do I want? Mostly things that imply a passive state, maybe a state of being protected. I want rest. I want peace. I want serenity. I want an absence of tension. Being sentient means being in tension. This is a problem. I don't want problems. I want rest.

It sounds like the closest that I want to do is "nothing". But why do I always sabotage that? Why, when I actually come close to doing nothing, am I driven to doing something? Sometimes so driven that I do anything, anything to not have to be doing nothing? Is my desire to do nothing maybe the desire for the impossible, because I know that I am not capable of doing nothing, not able to really be at rest, not able to tolerate a lack of tension? Or do I sabotage my own desire for fear that any desire, even if it is a desire for nothingness (or let's say, especially if it is a desire for nothingness), is sure to disappoint?

If you want to be safe by detaching yourself from all your desires, then you run into a paradox, because your desire to detach yourself from all desires is in itself a desire you must detach yourself from. How do you do that? How on earth can that be done?

82: Getting to Santander

The next day was only a short stretch. It was 12 Kilometers to Santander. I was toying with the idea of walking further, but I also liked the notion of spending most of a day in a big city again.

I left together with Matthieu, after Lone had already gone. The day was somewhat misty, but the landscape was beautiful and our conversation was good as well. We reached a small town in which the church door was open, so we went inside. Since it was Sunday, we were thinking of staying for mass, but when we heard that it would not begin for another hour, we just went in for a brief time of silent prayer and then moved on.

We met Lone and the three of us continued together. The walk to Somo was easy and uneventful. From there we were to take the ferry into Santander. I had misunderstood Matthieu, however, when he had said something about the shelter being "just before the ferry." I'm not sure if that's what he had said, but I had assumed that he meant that the pilgrim shelter is in Somo. So I let Matthieu and Lone go ahead to Santander, while I looked around Somo for a pilgrim shelter. I asked some women, but they told me that the only one they knew about was in Santander.

I took the ferry an hour later.
In Santander I hung around a park for a while, and found a tourist information booth. I eventually found the pilgrim shelter, and reserved myself a bed by putting my backpack on it. The man working there was strongly opposed to this gesture.

"That backpack has been all over the place!" He yelled at me. "You've probably had it lying on the ground, where it's dirty and where people have spit on. And now you put it on a bed!?"

I mumbled an apology. This seemed like obsessive cleanliness to me, especially when compared to the state that most pilgrim shelters had been in.

The shelter was closing for the rest of the afternoon, and I could come back in the evening to spend the night. I was told that there was a pilgrim's special at the restaurant downstairs. I went out into the city to walk around. I felt guilty for craving a McDonald's hamburger.

81: Reflections on James, Part 2: Trials and temptations

The first thing that James launches into after a brief greeting is the encouragement to consider trials a pure joy, because they lead to perseverance, which leads to maturity and completeness.

A few verses later, he says,

When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.

It's a sort of neat parallel here:

trials -> perseverance -> completeness
temptation/desire -> sin -> death

But how is this to be understood? How can there be a trial which is not also a temptation? Maybe we just need to remember that every circumstance, good or bad, put us in a situation where a new path to sin has opened up, but that this is not the same thing as calling the circumstance itself a temptation.

But, to turn it around, how is a temptation not a trial? Why should we consider trials pure joy, as they are the means to our perfection, and yet abstain from attributing temptation to God? If one verse later he says,

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights,

then what exactly is a trial? Can we attribute those to God, since we are told that they are grounds for rejoicing and since they complete us? Are they now a good gift or not?

I am probably understanding all these terms wrong. I can agree that a trial is not, in itself, a temptation; but I can't imagine a temptation that is not a trial. And if I am to give thanks for trials "of all sorts", then that would include temptations. Do I thank God because I'm being tempted, and yet make sure not to attribute the temptation itself to Him? Should we really say that the devil does God's dirty work?

The other difficulty I'm carrying with me all my life is that of "my own desires". If my own desires lead to sin and from there to death, it would be better to not have any desires, wouldn't it?

I have been suspicious of my desires all my life, because of passages like these. But in trying to abolish my desires I did not grow closer to God. It tortured me. And my encounters with God have had with them a certain character of liberating my desires, not destroying them. What little I know about the joy of the Lord was actually recognized through my desires, and not by abolishing them.

So how to make sense of this passage? Is it simply a difference between my "evil" desires and my "regular" ones? That, too, is a distinction I'm not ready to make. Any desire in me is to some extent "normal" or even "good" and to some extent tainted, and not in a way that is easy to differentiate. Evil is mixed in thoroughly, like sugar dissolved in water, so that I cannot draw a line through my desires to say, "this line separates the normal desire from the evil one."