The Moth Did Not Sin

On divine goodness and the suffering of the innocent.

God’s will is more life.
And we are all fodder
for its new beginnings.

Yes
we are all in its web.
Threaded through the hunger
of something vaster
than mercy or malice.

The moth did not sin.
or the spider gloat.

To be devoured
is to be woven
into silk,
memory,
and the next breath
of the world.

And still,
we fly toward it.
Every time.

“ God's will is more life.” I wrote that, and I am not sure I am entitled to say it. Life continues. It consumes, reproduces, makes use of what dies. I can observe something of that. But when I call it God’s will, what have I added? Have I understood something, or have I given the process a name that makes it easier to accept?

More life for whom? Certainly for the spider. The moth has a rather different experience of the arrangement. We can stand back and admire the whole thing, the intricacy of the web, the extraordinary economy of a world in which one creature feeds another. But we are standing back. We are not the thing caught in it.

The moth did not sin, or the spider gloat. There is no villain here. That is what makes the encounter difficult. We are accustomed to looking for someone to blame when something suffers. Someone was careless, someone was cruel, someone made a choice. Find the fault and we have somewhere to direct our anger. Here, hunger is enough. Nothing has gone wrong with the arrangement. The arrangement is what we are looking at.

Why do we expect innocence to offer protection? I think many of us carry some version of that expectation, even when experience has repeatedly contradicted it. Surely goodness should count for something. Surely a creature that has done no harm should be allowed to continue unharmed. We know this is not how the world works. Yet when suffering arrives, we still ask what we did to deserve it. The question reveals the agreement we thought we had.

And if we believe in a good God, the difficulty becomes more acute. What does goodness mean here? We would hardly call a person good merely because they kept a process going, regardless of what happened to those caught inside it. We would ask about the particular lives. We would ask what could have been prevented. Does applying the word to God change its meaning so completely that we can no longer recognise what we are saying?

There are answers available. A greater purpose. A whole we cannot see. An understanding beyond our own. And perhaps our understanding is profoundly limited. I have no difficulty admitting that. But a limit to my understanding cannot, by itself, tell me what lies beyond it. If I do not know, on what grounds am I insisting that this particular suffering serves a good I cannot name? What gives me the right to explain another creature’s loss so confidently?

It is easier to speak of a greater purpose when you are not the one paying for it. That does not make every belief in purpose false. It does mean we should pay attention to where we are standing when we offer it. There is a considerable difference between finding meaning in what you have endured and assigning meaning to what someone else is enduring. One is an account of your own life. The other can become a way of asking someone to accept what you do not have to bear.

Even the poem does it. “To be devoured is to be woven into silk, memory, and the next breath of the world.” There is beauty in that thought. There is also a danger that the beauty makes the loss too easy to pass over. The moth continues as something else, we say. But whatever continues, its life as this creature has ended. Have we attended to that, or hurried towards the next breath because the last one is harder to stay with?

I cannot stand outside this either. I eat. My continued existence involves the consumption of other living things. I can question the arrangement while remaining entirely dependent on it. So what am I asking for when I ask that life be otherwise? Can I even imagine the world I am demanding? And does my inability to imagine it mean I should stop asking? Dependence does not settle the question. It makes my place within it uncomfortable.

“And still, we fly toward it.” I am no more certain what that means than I am of the first line. We reach for life. We become attached to particular people, particular creatures, this world. Knowing that we will lose them does remarkably little to reduce their importance. Perhaps it increases it. But our willingness to live cannot settle whether the conditions of living are good. It tells us that we want to be here. Is that desire evidence of divine goodness, or something we are asking divine goodness to answer for?