December 15, 1977
Dear Dr. Morris,
I was one of the inmates who attended your seminar here at Terre Haute. If you remember, I'm the one who had doubts whether there was a God or not. I still have my doubts about God.
I want to believe there is a God, but until I can be convinced or have explained the "Justice of His will," I will still have my reservations about his existence.
Let me te1l you something of myself and maybe you can tell me if f am justified in having doubts about God.
I was born 30 years ago in a small town in Texas named San Juan. I never asked to be born.
Was that the will of God?
My mother and father were divorced when I was three years old. I was kicked back and forth between my mother and my father.
Was that the will of God?
I finally ended up with my mother and she took me to Illinois while I was still three. She tried every possible way to support me. She eventually resorted to selling herself just to try to feed and clothe me. I do not blame my mother for what she did. At the age of ten my mother's body gave out and she contacted tuberculosis. I was taken from her and put in an orphanage.
It was called St. Vincent's home for children. There I spent the next five years where I was taught to love and fear God. During that time I was not in contact with my mother for three years, even after she got out of the T.B. sanitarium she was in because she was labeled an unfit mother by the state authorities and they refused her any communication or contact with me.
Was this God's will?
As this was a Catholic orphanage, we went to mass everyday and prayed every day. I was very religious during my stay there. At one time I was thinking of being a priest.
What happened?
I was disillusioned when things started getting worse. I got
kicked out after completing the 8th grade because I was talking to a girl. We were taught that sex was an original sin and anyone seen talking to a girl had sex on his mind. So I was sent to a detention home and soon after my so-called father got custody of me and took me to Texas and put me to work in the fields. After he had enough money (from my work and sweat) he dumped me at his mother's, my grandmother. I was sixteen years o1d at that time. Since then I was on my own since she was too old to care for me and my father never sent her financial help.
Soon after I left for Idaho as a migrant field worker since
that is all I knew as far as work was concerned and I never went back. After the migrant workers left for home, I stayed. I did not suspect what I was to go through for the next couple of years.
Since I was only 16, it was almost impossible for me to get employment. So I bummed around. I ate from the left-over garbage that was thrown away in the back of restaurants. Sometimes I would get up nerve enough and go inside and order a meal, and when I was through, when the waitress was not looking, I'd run out the door without paying. At one time I slept in a cemetery for two weeks!
I would steal the powdered soap from the rest-rooms of service stations and with that I would wash my clothes on the banks of a river, under the bridge where I could not be seen.
Were these events the will of God?
Getting off the subject of myself, what about those other people that are suffering and have no place to stay? The people in South America, the people in Asia, the starving
people in Bangladesh. All those poor innocent children who are starving to death. They never asked to be born either.
Was that God's will?
How do you justify that?
While I was in Idaho I got a chance and enrolled in the Job Corps in Astoria, Oregon. I was there for one year. While
I was there I managed to get my G.E.D. and a certificate as an automotive parts specialist. I was nineteen at the time.
Still I wasn't prepared for my next encounter. Prejudice. I never knew any prejudice until then. I partly put the blame
on the Orphanage for this. I had never even heard of the word.
I got married for the first time three months after I got out of the Job corps. I started work at a car dealership as an auto parts counterman. New parts help came and went. Most with advancement. I always wondered why they never promoted me since I knew more about the parts business than most of the ones that advanced ahead of me. I am of Mexican descent and they were white. I was eventually raid off. Even though I had seniority over others. During that time my wife and I divorced. Thank goodness there were no children. The next few years I just "bummed. "
I arrived in Michigan in 1972 where I met my present wife. She had 3 children by a previous marriage. During the time I was with her up until the time of my incarceration I worked at various different jobs, never able to find a decent job with fair wages to support her and my family which was now five.
A famjly member asked me one day if I wanted to make some easy money and I said yes. That is when I got started selling narcotics. I didn't do it for luxuries or riches but just to support myself and my family. Before I started my illegal means I found out I had high blood pressure and also had taken a tuberculosis test which came out positive
so it wasn't easy for me to find a job. Since my incarceration I have been taking medicine for T.B. as medical records here will verify.
Anyway, I am being deprived of what I love the most my family, because I broke the law trying to survive. My family
is being punished also. My kids are being punished by paternal deprivation. Just because of trying to survive and give them what I never had. They are suffering like I am. They never asked to be brought into this world to suffer.
Is this God's will?
Well sir, this is only a fraction of my story. Do you blame me for doubting that there is a God? Yes, I've prayed to Him. I've never asked for much just a decent life.
Is this life decent?
Did I ask for much?
Any help you can give me will be greatly appreciated. I want to believe but circumstances will not permit me full belief. Please help me put my mind at ease about God.
And if there is a God, may He bless you and repay you for
any help you might possible be able to give me concerning
Him.
Your Friend,
Name withheld
P.S., Thank you for listening and for your time.
* * *
January 18, 1978
Dear Friend,
First 1et me thank you for the honor you give me in allowing me to share in some of the pain of your life.
What I am going to say can help you if it is possible. Your pain may be so deep and so profound that you can miss entirely what I wish to give you in this letter. Should this is the case, hopefully it will subside in time, and your mind is no longer clouded with confusion and bitterness.
Was it God's will for you to be born? It would be absurd to say that it was not. God was aware of your birth before the earth was formed and in accord with this knowledge, incorporated your existence into His purpose. God make no mistakes. You are here and you are loved by Him.
Was it God's will for your home to break up and for you to be shuffled back and forth between your parents? No. It was not. Such a determination is completely inconsistent with the character of a loving God.
However, there are indeed certain limitations God imposes on Himself with regard to the creation of human beings. One of these is the right and freedom God has given us to choose for ourselves. God will not violate the right of His human creations to choose.
Hence, we can and do often choose wrongly. We chooses to do evil. A man chooses to kill six million Jews. We chooses to wage absurd wars. We chooses to murder, rape, kill and maim. Innocent people suffer because of evil choices.
Suppose we did not have the ability to choose between good and evil? We would all be automotons. We would operate in mechanical, knee-jerk fashion. We would do only what God wanted us to do -- puppets on a string. We could not choose to love God. We would love Him automatically. We couldn't help it. We could not choose to love each other. It would all be push button and reaction. This is not love. This is not relationship. This is not human. This is not the way God created us to be.
Was it God's will for your mother to have tuberculosis? Some Christians might say yes. I cannot accept this. I do
not subscribe to the religious teaching that God is "disciplining" or punishing someone when they have an illness. I think that God is just as sensitive to the pain of in injury or disease as the one actually experiencing it.
Then why doesn't he do something about it? Sometimes he does. When Jesus was on the earth he healed hundreds--maybe thousands. He sti1l does. But he did not heal everybody. Disease and illness is the result of natural processes which function according to natural 1aw. Like the law of gravity. The same law which brings an airplane safely back to earth is also responsible for the loss of life if it crashes. Why are there things like viruses, vermin, and other assorted destructive natural forces? I don't know. Perhaps it is the result of the "curse" spoken of in the early chapters of Genesis.
None of us live in a vacuum. Everything we do affects those around us either positively or negatively. But none of these things tell me that God has stopped loving me. If I understand the Bible correctly, and if I have learned anything about God at all in my years as His child -- it is that he hurts when I hurt. In the same way that I hurt when my wife or one of my children is hurt. I hurt because I love them. God hurts because he loves us. Sometimes He intervenes and stops the hurting, heals the injury or disease or alters the course of men and events. This is called a miracle. But he does not do this for everyone.
Why do it for some and not others? You'll have to ask Him.
But it is clear that to do so would be to substantively alter the natural forces put in motion at the beginning of creation. By what rationale he chooses whom He will perform a miracle for, I cannot say. I can only accept it. If He does not choose to heal my pain, it can do one of two things to me: It can drive me away from Him, or it can push me closer to Him. But that is my choice, and it is yours too.
I am reminded of an Old Testament personality who knew far deeper than you or me what it was like to suffer for no reason. I refer of course, to a man named Job. After his home, children and great personal wealth was taken from him by
assorted tragedies, and he was left with his wife who was of abysmal comfort -- whose only contribution toward easing his agony was the cynical and depressing remark, "Why don't you just curse God and die . . ." after all this he suffered the eruption of his skin into vicious and painful boils. And then he suffered the long harangue of his friends who suggested that somehow the reason for all of his agony was that he had offended God. Job's response to these guys was to my mind the classic bottom line: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him..."
Job has something to teach us all. It is that our relationship with the Lord is based upon love and trust --
not events and experiences -- be they pleasurable or painful.
All this love and trust requires is to reduce our focus on pain, make a concious decision to realign that focus on God's good will toward us. Allow ourselves to feel His love -- and when we do, we find a well of living water springing up inside us and filling us with more love than we can possibly imagine.
With God's blessings,
Paul D. Morris, Ph.D.
