My dear friend,

As we descended the front steps on Sunday last, I heard you extend gentle kind words of affirmation that it was all right, okay, if I had disagreed with you on some point of discussion during the preceding hour. Of course, with my customary slowness of wit, no appropriate reply rose to mind until I had revisited the moment, turned it over, examined and reexamined every nuance as slower wits must. Having now done so, I write this equally gentle reply commencing at 7:40 AM on this morning of November 6, 2024, a moment when it is raining outside my warm house, the overcast sky a lowering, windy dark gray which conveys that the sunlight may never be seen again. But I know it will.

At no time did I disagree with you, esteemed friend, and if I ever did I would be most diplomatic about it. My genuine disagreement was with the author of words you quoted in the second reading, to the effect that God never hands us a burden greater than we can handle. This morning I still disagree, perhaps more strongly than ever this morning, and I must tell you precisely why, as a caring friend should.

Only a day earlier I had read about the mostly-unrecorded residents of a Polish town, several thousand men, women and yes children, who the invading Nazis in 1939 herded into a great bulldozed trench and systematically murdered with machine guns. Their cruel fate leapt unbidden into mind when I heard that old author’s rosy opinion that God never hands us more than we can handle. Inside I felt a red tidal wave, as recent memory recalled that heinous crime in Poland, insisting:  Not true—sometimes He does.

I see such overburdenings everywhere, all the time nowadays—increasingly—and they are there for us all to see: the addicted young mother, her livelihood and family wrecked because she hasn’t learned to handle it, and may die before she does; the homeless outcasts on Second Street and New York sidewalks who used to live in warm houses but couldn’t handle a mortgage’s balloon-interest increase and a car’s broken transmission at the same time; the Desert Storm vet who’s been weeping in a group home for thirty-three years now; the wheelchaired man begging with his pasteboard sign in the median at the entrance to Walmart. Most obviously, life has handed each of them more than they could handle.

In the manner of science, I daily observe that circumstances hand a lot of people more than they can handle, observing too that many people attribute random human circumstances to acts of Godly will, though rarely taking note of the distinction between Godly will and random circumstance. It is a perfect example of the white crow rule. If you see one single white crow, that is quite sufficient to prove—proof positive—that not all crows are black. And thereby, with but a single exception, the black crow supposition has fallen. When one hundred noted scientists signed a letter to the editor all agreeing that Einstein’s theory of relativity was wrong, he quietly noted that if his ideas were wrong one signature would have been sufficient.

Now what matters to me, as it did I think to Einstein, is not the rightness or wrongness of the idea itself, it is the cascade of other wrongnesses that are enabled to logically follow from the single portal of one quite wrong belief unthinkingly accepted. So let’s not propagate it. People clearly do get handed more than they can handle, all the time and all around us, and a lot of those poor souls buckle under the load.

The truly terrible part is the double misunderstanding that can and does flow from the one wrong idea. Thinking God doesn’t hand out more than people can handle is erroneous, because clearly a whole lot of people suffer from that very thing. What’s worse, and compounds the wrong, is the belief that God did it, or would do such a thing. It’s not God’s fault that those people lost a home to repossession and are now homeless, or got fired because their car could no longer get them to work. It’s our fault. We passively accede to a gluttonous economic model that causes such wrongs routinely, daily, so commonly that we stop noticing how terribly wrong are these wrongnesses. And we don’t say a word about that, even while perpetuating wrong thinking that “God would never hand anyone more than could be handled.”

And thus stands my gentle clarification on this doubly dark morning of November 6, 2024, tendered in friendship that loves and cares. Since anonymity is here maintained, I think I’ll just make this the next upload to my blog a couple of weeks hence. Such sentiments might finesse the tone of what I’ve been putting on there. Perhaps I’ll follow it up with details on exactly how to fix our broken, greed-based damned economic model that constantly hands some souls more than they can handle, those details I’ve been refining for twenty years. Maybe some younger person will pick up on my simple ideas for an ethical economy—ethical for a refreshing change—and run with them. Who knows?