But WHY?! - Ananda Portland

Recently while I was coming to grips with the difficult situation facing our community, I was trying to understand things better by talking to a long-time resident. I slowly started to ask her “Why…” then paused to properly formulate my question, to which she responded “Ahh yes, the best kind of question.” And in that moment I had a profound realization of the contrast between how often I’m asking God that question and how often my understanding of the answer actually helps me.

In school I was taught that when you’re writing a factual paper, it’s important to always include the 5 W’s: Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Now, the first 4 W’s in that process are the easy ones, like putting stats on the back of a baseball card. But when you get to the 5th word, “Why,” everything suddenly seems to become a bit more complicated. Now WHY is that??

For me, it helps to remember that we are God’s children. But not in the sense of perfectly well-mannered little cherubs silently sitting in church with folded hands; but instead more like Lord of the Flies, where we’re essentially left to our own devices and chaos often rules the day.

Having children myself, I often hear that wonderful “Why?” for a variety of reasons. Most days it’s asked around the topic of bedtime, as in “WHY do I have to brush my teeth?” even though they’ve brushed teeth at every bedtime since they can remember. Or almost always when the timer for screen-time goes off, I will hear “WHY do I have to turn the screen off?”

Yet how often do people cry out in anguish that exact same question when a loved one dies, or after a big loss? Just like children, as if we didn’t know the timer of life was set, and going to run out at some point sooner than we’d like, we resist what’s happening and try to “reason” with God.

My dear children will also ask me “why” questions that give me the immediate urge to say “Because I said so!” yet always require further explanation. “Why do I need to go to bed?” or “Why do I need to brush my teeth?” are questions that any mature adult could readily answer, yet children don’t have the foresight or maturity to understand the consequences of their own actions, and thus questions such as these are incomprehensible to them. So telling them “you’ll understand when you’re older” is entirely unsatisfying to them.

In the final analysis, are we really any different? Just because our questions are more complex, or seemingly unanswerable, doesn’t mean that a bit more spiritual maturity, experience, or foresight will help us understand what seems incomprehensible. Yet it’s all too easy to dwell on these questions, and to take the lack of a satisfying answer as the absence of one.

So recently I’ve started to act a little bit more like I would love my children to act: in perfect faith in the wisdom of their father. After all, God has already shown me enough to know that I don’t know everything, or really anything for that matter. And when I put my faith in Him, I immediately feel better about everything.

Then, looking back on all the times I had faith, versus all the times I doubted, the pattern makes a strong case for more faith going forward, because whatever has happened has always worked out for the best, and time has solved almost all of my confusion from those experiences.

I also realized that when I want to say to my children “because I said so,” I could just as easily say “because I love you,” for the simple reason that everything I do for them, pleasant and unpleasant, comes from a place of love.

Now with new confusion over new experiences, do I really imagine things will be any different? Perhaps this time around, when the voices in my head cry out “But WHY?!” I’ll look up at my Divine Mother and Heavenly Father and, just to try something new, say “because God loves me and wants me to be free, and that’s good enough for now.”

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Indradevi

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