SOUL FOOD:

“God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” John Lennon sang in “God,” a song penned for the 1970 “Plastic Ono Band” album. What he meant remains anyone’s guess.

Whatever Lennon meant, tying God to our pain was no more original than suggesting God is a man-made concept. Let tragedy strike and not far behind it are plaintive cries.

“Where was God?” “God, why?” “What kind of God allows this?”

In “The Problem of Pain,” C.S. Lewis defined pain as “unmasked, unmistakable evil.” And in the face of evil, the question of how an all-loving, all-powerful God permits it persists.

Tomes have been written to answer this question that’s as tough as they come. Some, like Lewis’ book, are both sound and readable yet a quest exists for a simpler, snappier rejoinder.

That quest, I suppose, perpetuates a certain e-mail sent to me again and again. The e-mail boasts of being “the best explanation of why God allows pain and suffering” around.

But the illogic of its allegory bugs me. A lot.

The story goes: Because of sick people, abandoned children and other types of suffering and pain, a certain man’s barber doesn’t believe in the existence of God.

His patron is perplexed until he leaves the barber’s shop and spots a man with long, stringy, dirty hair and an untrimmed beard. Seeing this, he hastens back to the barber.

“Barbers do not exist,” he proclaims. “If they did, there would be no people with dirty long hair and untrimmed beards like that man outside.”

The barber, sure of his own being, disagrees. “What happens is people [like that man] do not come to me,” he argues with his patron.

“That’s the point!” cries the patron. “God, too, does exist! What happens is people don’t go to Him. That why there’s so much pain and suffering in the world.”

This is an explanation that pains me. In my world, without a better reason than that, an all-loving, all-powerful God would get up off his butt and go to them.

When I asked John McFarland, senior pastor of Fountain Valley United Methodist Church, his thoughts on the e-parable, he wrote there are “those who have been to the Barber who exists, [who] have tried to get their hair cut. They have begged the Barber to cut it.”

The Barber, though, does not cut their hair and it remains matted and long. To these people, it may indeed seem as though the Barber does not — or may as well not — exist.

“It’s a cute story,” McFarland wrote. But it doesn’t begin to address a subject for which such an answer is inadequate.

“I don’t try to resolve the suffering of individuals with some simple theological explanation,” wrote McFarland. “However, ultimately as human beings we find ourselves in a situation we did not create.”

And that situation, if we’re on this earth long enough, is replete with suffering and pain. Each pastor who responded to my request for his take on the barber story, in some fashion, offered this reason for that: We inhabit a fallen world.

Death and sin entered the world when Adam and Eve rebelled against God.

“Man’s desire to live life on his [own] terms versus God’s has consequences,” said Guy Grimes, senior pastor of Shoreline Baptist Church in Fountain Valley. An explanation, I venture, not as cute as the barber anecdote.

“That answer doesn’t suffice most people, understand that,” Grimes quickly added. “Some days it doesn’t suffice me either. We want more than that.”

There are certainly no quips or metaphors sufficient to explain pain and suffering, he said. Ben Unseth, executive pastor of Huntington Beach’s Grace Lutheran Church, was more blunt.

“In this life we will never understand pain and suffering,” he wrote. He spoke of the personal pain of losing his only child — a “grayness of existence” that embodied no feeling, no hope and no sense.

Yet having made it through that pain with “moment by moment plodding” and the help of family and friends, he, like other pastors, spoke of gaining a new perspective from suffering that he could not possibly relinquish.

“I wouldn’t want it for anybody, obviously,” said Grimes, speaking of his own chronic pain and another’s tragedy. “I wouldn’t want it for me. I don’t want it for you. I don’t want it on my enemy, even.”

Nevertheless he knows many, many people who have suffered what he describes as “undue personal pain” who tell him they would not change that for the world. To understand what God does in the midst of one’s suffering, he believes, one must experience it. He speaks of the mystery and promise of the Beatitudes, with which Jesus began his Sermon on the Mount.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” says the first. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” says the second. “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” says the eighth.

Gary J. Watkins, senior pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church, wrote to me about how God uses physical, emotional and spiritual pain to mold him into the person God wants him to be. “It is through the trials of life that God produces perseverance in us and perseverance produces character and character, hope,” he wrote.

Lee Walker, assistant for pastoral care at St. Wilfrid of York Episcopal Church in H.B., is content with the answer given in the Old Testament Book of Job. Before we have the nerve to question how God runs the universe, we first need to make a universe ourselves and run it better.

Of course, he says, we can’t do that. So instead, Walker aims to cause no pain or suffering in the world himself. With his own house in order, he says, he’ll be in a better position to question God.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.