A photo of mostly dark gray cloudy sky, with a turbulent sea at the bottom. White sans serif text reads, “I asked God, ‘Why are you taking me through troubled water?’ He replied, ‘Because your enemies can’t swim.’” The sharing source is “Purpose of Life.”
…but this macro is like encountering the twisted subterranean soul twin of “Footsteps in the Sand,” and then realizing that it was mainstream American Christianity all along.
A black and white photo of a shipwreck on a beach at high tide. The ship is in the bottom third of the image, and the rest is mostly cloudy sky. In the sky space, there is black serif text that says, “Ships don’t sink because of the water around them; ships sink because of the water that gets in them. Don’t let what’s happening around you get inside you and weigh you down.” The source is “Power of Positivity.”
Ships sink because they let themselves sink.
The Edmund Fitzgerald just wasn’t trying hard enough.
And don’t even get me started on the Titanic.
“Boo-hoo, poor me, my hulls are all breached!”
But did it really think about the signals it was sending when that iceberg starting hitting on it? I think maybe somebody wanted to become synonymous with catastrophic hubris.
The background image is a pink and purple-tinged sunset with a cloudy sky above, reflected in a still lake below. The bold sans serif dark font (possibly navy blue, possibly black) says, “When you replace ‘why is this happening to me’ with ‘what is God trying to show me’ everything changes.” The attribution at the bottom says “Liftable.”
For a while I tried to avoid macros that used sunsets as backgrounds. They are pervasive, but not in a particularly funny way.
Frankly, a sunset seems like a solid choice for making a quote feel more substantial when you haven’t really examined the implications of what you’re saying but it seems deep af.
There are just too many pithy quotes that have gone the sunset route, though, and I concluded that it’s more challenging to avoid them than to accept them.
I tried to come up with a pithy* shorthand quip to simultaneously acknowledge and dismiss the cliché, and it was surprisingly difficult. Here’s what I ended up with:
“Nice sunset, asshole.”
When my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I didn’t find myself wondering, “Why did this happen to me?” nearly as much as I wondered, “Why did this happen to him?”
There’s a slight, strange comfort in the agony of asking that unknowable question.
I appreciate the short answer that there is no simple, single reason, beyond that he was a human, and humans die.
It’s more like the comfort of bracing one’s back against a cold wind, rather than the comfort of retreating into a warm shelter for some hot cocoa.
Shortly after Dad died, a person in my small hometown offered me condolences and said, with no other preamble, “It’s really a blessing, though, isn’t?”
I understand that they meant well, and were struggling (as we all do) to offer appropriate words for unspeakable pain.
But the direct leap from “I’m sorry for your loss” to “It’s really a blessing” stands out in my memory as the worst** thing anyone said directly to me during that time (though there are certainly other close contenders).
The unwillingness to sit with the discomfort of ambiguity forces an even more uncomfortable narrative of intentionality.
This kind of dismissal of grief seems like at least one outcome of replacing “why is this happening” with “what is god trying to show me.”
Reframing is a skill, and there’s nothing wrong with looking for growth opportunities in difficult circumstances.
But that’s not a reason to stop asking “why” questions.
There may not ever be any grand, universal answer as to why a specific terrible thing happened to a specific person, but there are likely structural and systemic reasons that identifiably contribute to any given tragedy.
I trust that religious folx are able to create beautiful, substantive, and thoughtful things.
Art, architecture, arguments, image macros, and more.
And.
This kind of unselfconscious self-centeredness, which underlies so much of contemporary American Christianity, creates fertile soil for powerful institutions to deflect attention from themselves through victim-blaming and rationalization.
Of course your perspective changes when you stop trying to understand how things work.
It’s way easier to say “God is showing me things that are good for me to see” than it is to accept, “Many support systems are so fundamentally biased that some groups people are bound to suffer severe negative consequences” or “This is one of many possible outcomes of a confluence of circumstances, and it may not have happened for any grand ‘reason’ at all.”
The advice in this macro is to not focus on yourself so much, and yet you accomplish that by “realizing” (not “choosing to believe”) that an omnipotent, omniscient deity manipulated the world around you specifically with the hope of teaching you a valuable lesson.
That way, it’s your responsibility to accept that you have failed to discern the divine purpose behind your own suffering, and as a bonus you won’t even have time to question your government for allowing humans to die as punishment for not having hoarded enough dollars.
Sure, sometimes weak rationalizations look better in front of a sunset.
And sometimes the reasons “why something is happening to you” are nonexistent, and sometimes they’re utter crap, and it’s okay to feel unhappy when you notice that.
*Yes, yes, I see the irony.
Also, I am still figuring out the best way to handle footnotes in WordPress. For now, I am literally just using asterisks, and I hope to make it better in the future.
**Specifically, this was an unpleasant thing to hear from a person with a presumably Christian background (it is a very small town). In the lovely Jewish practice of saying “May their memory be a blessing” to mourners, it comes through clearly that the person’s memory is the blessing and not their actual death.
Pith Rant 
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