Some Poems on God's Inclusion of Evil

Poetry and Theodicy

Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash

Almost anyone can tell you the name of a Taylor Swift song or guess at how many career catches Travis Kelce has, but when was the last time you heard someone invoke the word “theodicy.” It’s a cool word. Say it out loud and it sounds like an Italian pastry. And yet the concept of theodicy has haunted me my whole life.

Put simply, the term refers to the human attempt to justify God’s often-confusing ways to men, and many, many philosophers have spent their bookish lives defending a supposedly all powerful God who seemingly allows so much evil to exist in the very world that He (it’s always a “He”) supposedly created.

And don’t blame it all on Adam and Eve. What did you think was going to happen when you let two clueless kids loose in a cornucopia of pleasures, and then allow a wily Serpent to tempt them.

I realized a long time ago while sitting in theology class at a Jesuit prep school, waiting for the Prefect of Discipline to drag me down to his office and trim my long locks, that it was quite impossible to satisfactorily explain the existence of evil in the world, much less to defend an all-good, all-loving God for letting it exist.

And yet the angst created by such evil, an evil that seems insatiable at times, often drives me a little batty, and so, as usual, I turn to black humor for solace. Very often the target of my confusion and disappointment ends up being my fellow humans, who have invented an incredible number of justifications and religious movements to normalize the fact that hundreds upon hundreds of babies die in Somalia every day while well-nourished Americans take slow slips on their Caramel Macchiatos obsessing about their “ab shredding” exercises..

Here are are a few examples from my While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems (Undertaker [book form, hardcover and paperback and KindleUndertaker, [for $5]), where we find an agitated first-person narrator navigating an uncertain terrain where anything can happen at any given time.

Snails

I admire the brute dampness of snails. I ate them once in a little restaurant outside Toronto. A medium-sized war was going on, and I was dating a girl I skipped school for. We’d go to the zoo and watch the orangutans regurgitate. We’d toss peanuts to the elephants, or wave to giraffes, hoping for their approval. Sometimes we’d end up in Canada, cubes of hash hidden in the studs of our jeans as my ’59 Rambler American lurched across the border. Unlike most stories, this one’s true, full of youth and trouble, but mostly confusion, especially about God, whom I began calling “God the Forgetful,” saddened that one baby could be born armless, another, with two heads. It had become hard to like God or depend on Him for the simplest chores. Even now wars rage on, babies still exploding from wombs minus arms and legs. You can’t even turn on the TV without hearing someone’s daughter explain to a wide-eyed audience how she had sex with nine guys and one woman to earn money for a home entertainment center. Makes me want to revert to Plan B. Makes me wonder why I’m back in Toronto, outside a jazz club, eating snails, watching an unmarked aircraft descend upon the city.

The Deep Footprints of God

Are you ready for the smoke? Are you ready for the mirrors? I dreamt that half my ancestors were following railroad tracks into a mine, the other half watching football on TV. “It wasn’t a dream, stupid, it was a wake-up call.” Who said that? It could have been God. I found His big footprints in the backyard mud yesterday, haloed by Carmine’s angel dust. “Existing is plagiarism,” someone wrote. Think about that until your head hurts, until darkness surrounds you like the shadow of a giant bat. The rain had stopped, and I was outside pleating a screen, trying to make an accordion for the wind, remembering that dream and how my father crushed walnuts in his bare hand. And there they were—my father’s footprints. It was Easter and he had come to visit. He had taken the dog out to pee and was smoking angel dust with Carmine when he stepped into a patch of mud. Yet I still believe in the deep footprints of God, know I’ll stumble into them, that He’ll part a cloud with a calloused right hand, look down on me and say, “Soldier on, boy, soldier on.”

Trees

How many things can you say about a tree? How many times compare it to our crummy lives, stretch the metaphor until its esophagus bursts or bleeds? We cut down our trees. Nothing symbolic about that. The baby raccoons were using them to climb onto the roof and torture me with their pretty faces. “Let me be,” I screamed, as they scratched the screen, wanting to lick or maybe even eat me. I couldn’t sleep for days, for weeks. I watched the spidery limbs of trees shadowboxing on my bedroom wall, as if something was grieving them, as if they wanted to be put out of their misery, as if they were saying, “Make it look like an accident.” But if by “accident” we mean that which comes without cause or design, there is really no such thing. That’s something God would have said, or one of His half-baked philosophers, and they would have been right, for it was indeed my landscaper-cousin who sawed those pretty logs you see drying in the sun, who drove those raccoons away. “Sleep quietly, dry logs,” I whisper, before retiring at night, then don my earphones, listening to an overweight actor recite some righteous Wordsworthian iambs.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems KindleUndertaker, [for $5])

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss