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delivered to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos
7 December 2008
Time begins, as we know it, with violence, a great explosion – a massive hydrogen bomb for all intents and purposes – tossing burning elements out into the cosmos at tremendous speed. Eventually the elements cool, and the universe begins to coalesce. Stars begin to form, then galaxies. One star in particular seems conducive to the support of life under the right conditions. Roughly 40 million years ago, our planet began to take shape as we know it. This planet hurtles through space at a blinding speed of roughly 67 thousand miles per hour. It orbits the sun at a distance of roughly 91 million miles. If it orbited any slower, the distance would close and the planet would roast. Any faster, and the distance would increase and the planet would freeze. The surface of the planet itself is covered by mostly water, and the parts that are not water are made up of relatively loosely connected land masses, floating at a snails pace, casual crashing into and careening off of each other over a span of deep time. The land shakes and tears itself apart as it moves. The massive amounts of water threaten to swallow the land from time to time. And the core of the planet, a molten fire, threatens to rise up through the cracks as well.
Somehow, amidst all of this speed and danger and fragility, the planet brings forth life. Over millions of years life evolves – first single-cell organisms, then more and more complex, until at last the planet brings forth the human race, a most unique species. Humans develop creativity, imagination, and, most importantly, free will. Where other animals live off instinct, the human animal is able to make choices, and being free, the species doesn’t always make the right choices. Often, we hurt others, we mistake ourselves for the be all and end all of existence, we act in ways that reflect the violence in which the universe is given birth.
Eventually, all of this will end. The same elements that were thrown out to cosmos will begin to collapse once more. Life as we know it will disappear, and everything that is will crush itself into a dense singularity until, as the theory goes, it explodes out into the cosmos once more.
In the mean time, here we are, free creatures capable of the most extraordinary acts of love and compassion, and the most horrendous acts of violence and hatred, living on a slowly shifting planet whose natural processes drown us or swallow us whole without warning, the whole thing hurtling through the vacuum of space at mind-numbing, deadly speed, and all the while needing to maintain a constant distance of orbit, lest the sun that gives life takes it instead.
It’s a wonder, sometimes, that we have survived this long amidst what amounts to chaos.
These being our givens, the question before us this morning is, “Why do bad things happen?”
Given my little prelude, you might have a clue about what my answer’s going to be. If I were more inclined to play the cynic this morning, I might just answer, “Because that’s the way of the universe” say “Amen” and send us off for coffee.
It wouldn’t be a wrong answer. But, it wouldn’t be enough of an answer, either.
If we all were purely rational creatures, that answer would be enough. We would have been satisfied with that answer years ago, and I’d be up here talking about something else. Problem solved.
But we’re not purely rational, are we? We’re emotional, too. We’re creative. Those annoying traits that make us truly human. We need to make meaning out of everything. So, when we ask, “Why do bad things happen?” we’re not looking for mere empirical causation, we’re asking an existential question. “Yes, I know bad things happen because they happen, so what? Why do they happen to us? Why me?”
Ever since humankind invented gods we’ve been inventing ways to try and control them. One way has been through our behavior. Over the millennia, we’ve developed a relatively simple system of justice. Do the right thing and you’re rewarded, or at least left alone. Do the wrong thing, and you’re punished. It works remarkably well amongst ourselves here on Earth. Why shouldn’t it apply to my relationship with the cosmos, with my God? I’ve done all the right things, said all the right prayers, sacrificed the right goats, shared with my neighbors, loved my family. I haven’t stolen or murdered or hurt anyone. So, why do I all of a sudden have this debilitating disease? Why did my wife leave me? Why has my retirement fund disappeared into the ether?
What have I done to deserve this?
For thousands of years, the most common answer to this question has been, “You must have done something!”
It’s the most common and least satisfying answer. It has survived for ages and given rise to a host of inappropriate responses to human suffering:
It’s God’s punishment.
There’s a lesson in this for you, somewhere.
It’s all part of God’s plan.
God doesn’t give people more suffering than they can bear.
The most recent public example of this line of thinking in my memory is Pastor John Hagee blaming Hurricane Katrina on the planning committee of the New Orleans Gay Pride Festival.
Lest you think I’m merely singling out fundamentalist Christians, let me assure you this misguided attitude crosses religious and cultural lines. For example, the New Age gurus are just as bad, especially the positive thinking, law of attraction folks. A few years back, some colleagues and I were debating the merits of The Secret. The basic premise of the book is the so-called “law of attraction” – think positively and you’ll receive positive things (usually material things). If bad things are happening to you, you must be thinking too negatively.
Now, I don’t discount positive thinking as a whole, just as a means of using the cosmos as your personal shopper. It’s a very popular book, and I apologize in advance if it’s a favorite of yours, but it made me physically ill. I picked it up at the library to see what the fuss was about and threw it down in disgust a third of the way through when it explicitly blamed genocide on the victims because, gosh darn it, they just weren’t thinking positively enough.
The victims of genocide brought it on themselves. See, they must’ve done something!
The problem with this type of thinking is that it denies the laws of nature and absolves people of responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
And so the idea of deserving what’s come to you is a disturbing and an unsatisfying answer to the question, “Why do bad things happen?” People have struggled with it and railed against for a long time. Perhaps the most famous struggle with the question in literature comes to us from the book of Job in the Hebrew scriptures.
The author of Job certainly struggles with the idea of deserved and undeserved suffering. Job is presented as the most pious and righteous man on earth. Job has done nothing to deserve his misery. God and Satan have merely made a bet that he will curse God if everything is taken away from him. Here we have the notion of suffering as a test of faith, which isn’t a much more satisfying answer than suffering as retribution, but that’s beside the point for Job at this moment. Job’s friends attempt to “comfort” him by explaining that he must deserve his suffering, maybe he just forgot what he’s done, see everything’s right with the world and the universe is functioning properly.
Job’s author mocks these guys mercilessly. These “comforters” are more interested in defending God, or rather protecting their fragile, shallow understanding of God, than they are in showing true sympathy to Job.
Despite the author’s struggle with conventional wisdom of the time, the book of Job still ends badly. Job praises God, God wins his bet, and Job is rewarded with replacements of what he’s lost, because that should fix everything, right? I should note that Job keeps his original wife through all of this. She’s rewarded with the job of bearing all the replacement children. Lucky her. Not the best treated woman in the Bible. So, while Job’s author challenges the notion of suffering as retribution, he still ends with a message that God eventually does right by the righteous. Any suffering is a temporary setback. We’ll give him an A for effort, but his answer is still unsatisfying.
It’s certainly an unsatisfying answer for Harold Kushner. Rabbi Kushner wrote his now classic book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, as a response to the premature death of his son Aaron, who is born with progeria, a condition that causes rapid aging of the body. Aaron Kushner died a few days after his fourteenth birthday. Even before his death, Rabbi Kushner was reevaluating his relationship with his God and his understanding of human suffering. For Kushner, God is a creator and a comforter, not a destroyer or a capricious judge of humankind.
Bad things happen much for the same reasons as we outlined earlier. Because the laws of nature are what they are, because people have free will and make bad choices, and, for Kushner, because God is both too loving to take our freedom and too limited to violate the laws of nature for our benefit.
Bad things happen because the universe is, despite all of its beauty and wonder, a dangerous, chaotic place, and because we human beings are singularly talented at hurting each other and ourselves.
The seeming randomness of it all is enough to send one spiraling downward into despair. If our suffering is due to randomness and chaos, then perhaps there is no meaning to it. And yet, still we ask the question, “Why do bad things happen?” What does it all mean?
Where is the meaning in our suffering?
Our answer begins with the title of Rabbi Kushner’s book. It’s important to note that the book is not called Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, but When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Bad things will happen. It is, tragically, inevitable, and more often than not the events are senseless and meaningless. The meaning comes after the event, in our response to suffering – to our own and to those around us. Meaning begins when we can discover for ourselves or prove to others that we are not alone.
Where do we begin?
Job’s comforters, believe it or not, set the example for us. When they first appear, Job’s friends come and just sit with him, quietly. It is, for me, one of the most moving moments in the Bible, a model for ministry. Job’s friends are just with him, sitting in his presence letting him lament and vent his anguish.
Then they ruin it all by opening their mouths. In the span of a few chapters, we are shown a model of what to do and what not to do.
It’s not an easy thing to just be with someone who’s suffering. It makes us uncomfortable, and we are, by our nature, fixers. We hope that with our sharp eyes and our keen minds and the right Chilton manual that we can repair what is broken.
But, we can’t fix suffering with our words. There are no magic words that can make suffering stop. Nothing we can say is the right thing. Though it is against our instincts, sometimes the only thing we can do is to just be with others in their pain. (This is one of the main practices of our covenant circles – deep listening with a prohibition against trying to “fix” things.)
From the other end, we often have a hard time reaching out when we need the help and the presence of others. Sometimes the discomfort of others sends a message that maybe we’re supposed to be alone in our suffering. Rabbi Kushner tells the story of one couple who asks him if they really need to go through with the ritual of sitting shiva – the Jewish memorial week after a death. “Do we really need . . . to have all those people sitting in our living room? Couldn’t we just ask them to leave us alone?”
“My response,” writes Kushner, “is, ‘No, letting people into your home, into your grief, is exactly what you need now. You need to share with them, to talk to them, to let them comfort you. You need to be reminded that you are still alive, and part of a world of life.’”
We’re not always good at asking for what we need, or at giving what is truly needed when within the depths of our grief and confusion. It’s one of the reasons I pray as I do each Sunday, from time to time hoping for both the courage to ask and the strength to give. It is, in the end, all that is left for us.
In 1956, poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish premiered his Pulitzer prize-winning verse play, J.B. The horrors of World War II were still fresh in society’s memory, with it’s massive death count and the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. A cold war has ensued, and the threat of mutually assured destruction looms large over the national psyche. It was as senseless a time as any. In this environment, MacLeish takes on the story of Job. It’s as odd choice. Who would still praise God amidst the senseless chaos of the time?
But, MacLeish believes in Kushner’s God – a God powerless to prevent the suffering of creation. For the most part, MacLeish presents a faithful modern retelling of the Job story – until the end. Where the Biblical Job praises God, MacLeish’s J.B. forgives the deity, and moves on with his life in the quiet and comforting presence of his wife, leaving behind a baffled God. Job’s wife is a much better character in MacLeish’s play, the brains of the operation. At the end, she chides J.B. for his earlier argument with his God:
“You wanted justice, didn’t you? There isn’t any. There’s the world . . . You wanted justice and there was none – Only love.”
“He does not love . . .” Job protests.
“But we do,” she answers. “That’s the wonder.”
The cosmos was born in violence, and will end violently. In between, we are here, fragile people on a fragile planet. That we will suffer to some degree or another during our brief lives is inevitable. We are capable of both great harm and great love. When the time comes, may we choose to enter into the presence of one another’s pain and grief with our overwhelming capacity for love and compassion.
The meaning in human suffering only comes when we can continue to respond to one another with our own loving presence. We can expect to more. We should expect no less.
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