When Bad things happen to good people by Harold S. Kushner

I read this book today at the pool .  I read a lot of bad- good- okay- books but this was was excellent.  Here are some passages from the book that I want to remember:
Could it be that God does not cause the bad things that happen to us?  Could it be that he does not decide which families will suffer but rather that He stands ready to help them and us cope with our tragedies if we could only get beyond the feelings of guilt and anger that separate us from him?  Could it be that " how could God do this to me? is really the wrong question for us to ask?

There is a German psychological term, Schadenfreude, which refers to the embarrassing reaction  of relief we feel when something bad happens to someone else instead of to us.   They can't help feeling an embarrassing spasm of gratitude that it happened to someone else and not to them.
We see psychology at work elsewhere, blaming the victim so that the evil doesn't seem so irrational and threatening.  Blaming the victim is a way of reassuring ourselves that the world is not a bad  a place as it may seem and that there are good reasons for peoples's suffering.

"God, why are you doing this to me but rather "God see what is happening to me.  Can You help me?"  We will turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened  and comforted.

but in fact, pain is natures way of telling us that we are overexerting ourselves, that some part of our body is not functioning as it was meant to, or is being asked to do more than it was intended to do.But pain does not represent God's punishing us.  It represents natures way  of warning good and bad people alike that something is wrong. Only humans can find meaning in their pain.  Pain is the price we pay for being alive.
It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experience of pain  meaningful and others empty and destructive.
Too Often, in our pain and confusion, we instinctively  do the wrong thing.  We don't feel we deserve to be helped, so we let the guilt, anger, jealousy and self-imposed loneliness make a bad situation even worse.
When stating "  Why is God doing this to me"  the mistake was thinking it was a question.  It is not a theological question at all but a cry of pain.  There should be an explanation point instead of a question mark.
The answer should not be theological but sympathy.

Do not say:
               Anything critical of the mourner
               Anything which tries to minimize the mourners pain
                Anything that asks the mourner to disguise or reject his feelings

We need sympathy more than we need advise
We need compassion.
We need physical comfort.
We need friends who permit you to be angry, to cry and to scream.

Come and listen

An appropriate sense guilt  makes people try to be better.  But an excessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us  of our self-esteem and perhaps of our capacity to grow and act.

The text book definition of depression is anger turned inward instead of being discharged outward.

Fate, not God sends us the problem.

What do we do with the anger when we have been hurt?  The goal, is we can achieve it, would be to be angry at the situation, rather than at ourselves, or at those who might have presented it or are close to us trying to help us,or at God who let it happen.  Getting angry at ourselves makes us depressed. Being angry at other people scares them away and makes it harder for them to help us.