Having an adolescent at home is a challenge, but answering their questions without triggering other question is a totally different one. And I should know this, because what else can you expect from the curious daughter of a researcher-father?
Almost every day, she unloads a question on me, and the rest of my day is buried into deep thoughts over the answer. Well, this time, I thought her question was an easy one. She asked, “Dad, why is God invisible?”
Wow, that was easy. I felt like a child who knows the answer to the question the teacher asked: “Our eyes are not capable of seeing Him. There are other things, too, that are invisible for us; like love or intelligence.” That was it. I was smiling in celebration of my effortless success. But my daughter, she wasn’t smiling: “I didn’t ask why we can’t see Him. I said why is He invisible; that is why did He choose to be invisible to us?”
**
“Helicopter” parents would help their child in everything to the point that they would not let the child enjoy the feeling of success. Such kids would have difficulty in developing self-confidence and entrepreneurship. “Absentee parents,” on the other hand, would not bother themselves, even if their kids were crushed under incessant failure. Such kids would have difficulty in developing trust and establishing long-term commitment.
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I remembered that parents were extremely important because the relationship between them and the child was the framework for the relationship between the individual and God. And conversely, God’s lordship was a model for parenting. So, if God chose to be invisible, was it a lesson for me as a parent? For example, He was invisible, but He was not absent. People discovered God best when they were in their most desperate situations. And in normal times, He was enabling us to enjoy success and self-confidence by helping and guiding us in our actions without overriding our egos. Had this help and guidance been substituted by His infinite Will and Power always, we could not have controlled our actions, and so, we could not have developed even the notion of self.
**
In any case, I didn’t want to be remembered through my negatives. Wasn’t I educated not to hit people in the face with their mistakes, but on the contrary, to cover them, if possible? Right at that moment, I saw that being invisible was the perfect way God did this for us. If He revealed His presence every time we did something wrong, how shameful would that be? But, whether covering a flaw or doing a favor, what crowned those good deeds was when the person who committed them didn’t expect anything back. The best help was described as “done by the right hand without the left hand being aware of it.” Doing favors while being invisible like angels was the ideal. So, the other person only knows that they have been covered, and that’s it. They can’t see anyone who is going to ask for a return by reminding them of the favor; they can’t remember a face whose appearance would rekindle the regrets of the past mistakes. Their pride is not wounded, and their dignity is intact. They are left with a gratitude that can only be paid forward by doing the same for others. I thought, in this context, being invisible was another way by which God taught us benevolence and magnanimity by example.
**
Then She added:
“Today, during the exam, the teacher stood beside me for a minute. You cannot imagine what a stressful minute it was. Not that I was doing anything wrong, but seeing her made me so nervous. I remembered that you had told me that we were in an exam in this life. Then it dawned upon me that God being invisible was not only a part of the exam, but also a part of the help to success.”
Every year, 12 to 25 million people attempt suicide worldwide, and 1 million of them achieve what they were aiming to achieve. That means that every 30 seconds, one person is dying by suicide. Be it a child, an elder, or an adult, suicide victims come from all ages.
**
“It is possible in this life that one receives death while perfectly healthy. It is also possible that one can survive despite miserable health. In other words, just like being healthy doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t die, there isn’t a mechanic relationship between being unhealthy and arriving at death. My own failure to die despite what happened to me is living proof of this.”
**
“The moment I realized that death is given, just like life is, my suicide attempt transformed from being a story of failure to a story of success, because that’s when I started believing in the unseen.”
Believing in the unseen was a quality that Fred did not have before, but why and how had it been the elixir that changed his failure into success? “It is so ironic and controversial. In the beginning, what I was missing was my acceptance of self-deficiency in grasping existence. In the end, by admitting to be incomplete, I was becoming complete; being completed by God.”
Suicide is one of the most severe sins one can commit, according to monotheistic religions. Yet, this young man found God in the very sin that could throw him light years away from God. “I don’t define myself anymore as an outstanding, perfect intellectual as my friends used to call me. Instead, I am a story in progress. No matter how severe the calamities or how satisfying the joys are, I don’t come to an end unless my author ends the story.”
My question to you is, how do you define the relationship between religion and science?
Left Brain:
This question was asked at many other occasions. For me, this is a straightforward issue. Personally, I am a believer. For me, science gathers information about the outside world. Religion tells me the purpose of the world. A more cliché way of saying the same thing is, “science answers how, religion answers why.” Therefore, I don’t see why the two should contradict or clash. You can have a user’s manual for a car or a computer. But what you are going to do with it is totally up to you. Science and technology are like that manual. From them, we learn to make use of what is available here in this world. But religion guides us in what we should do, or how we should do it.
Long, long ago, in a faraway world inhabited by numbers, it was a clear dawn when the world witnessed the birth of a new number. It was a baby as small as a dot, capable of nothing but crying. They named it Zero. The newborn had no merit at the time, but its presence nonetheless gave joy to life in the realm of numbers. The whole country reverberated with the good news of the birth of Zero.
In caring for baby Zero, the numbers took turns. Each number would hold the baby beside it. As the days passed, the numbers noticed something puzzling. Those numbers who gave care in the right way saw a never-seen abundance at home; everything would increase tenfold. The numbers who passed their turns superficially did not see any difference. Was it a sign from God that the numbers could not grasp?
**
And Zero died. They buried it under the quotient line. Roses grew on its grave that were as beautiful as Zero, as noble as One. Thus was commemorated the phrase “one over zero,” in order to refer to this beauty. It was only then that the numbers understood what Zero felt inside. The numbers visited Zero from time to time, whenever they needed a glimpse of beauty stretching from infinity. As powerless as it was, Zero helped others understand infinity not by its existence among them, but by lying below them.
He was generally calm and content; as if he already found the meaning of his life and what this life could offer him. He was not complaining about what he couldn’t do, he was not cursing or talking with remorse about his children. Everything was just calm with this man. His smiling face and his mature spirit very much felt like the sunny blue sky after a night of extreme snow.
