Gary Trudeau is one of the prophets of our time. The creator of the Doonesbury comic strip is not only prophetic in prediction, but he is also prophetic because of his keen insight into the human condition. Take this strip from 1990: Scotty, the Walden University Chaplain, says to Sal: "Sal, have you considered the church as a way of coming to terms with some of your problems?"
Sal: "No way, dude! The God thing doesn't make it for me, Okay? Look at what religion's given us - inquisitions, persecutions, 'holy' wars, and now terrorism! I just can't get into some macho God with his own private sense of justice that permits him to slaughter the evil and innocent alike!"
Scotty: "You make him sound like Dirty Harry."
Sal: "I just think he should lighten up, y'know?"[1]
November 11th marks the two-month anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; it is also Veterans Day, our national tribute those who have served our nation in wartime. Coincidentally, this Wednesday Hindus celebrate Diwali, the festival of light and peace; this Saturday Muslims begin the Holy Month of Ramadan, a time of spiritual renewal; and on November 19 Jews commemorate Krishtallnacht, "the night of shattered glass" which marked the beginning of the Holocaust. If ever there was a conjunction of world history and the teachings of religion, this is it.
However, my purpose is not to dwell on the 9-1-1 tragedy, but to raise the wider question of human brokenness - represented by the metaphor of life as a broken arc. It is human nature to yearn for perfection - the perfect circle, the perfect life. We soon learn, however, that no circle is perfect. When we apply geometry to human life we find that our lives are not perfect either; in fact, life is often quite messy. The arc of our lives is often shattered.
Humanity has developed its own litany in response to what author Peter DeVries calls life's "eternal severities." How often have we heard others say, or found ourselves saying, these words?
"My God, I can't believe this is happening to me!
I'm so totally unprepared.
I'll never be the same.
My life's a failure.
Everywhere I look now, I only see reason for despair.
I just plain feel sorry for myself, that's all.
I feel trapped in this useless body.
Helpless, utterly helpless...
I want to scream and I can't.
What did I do to deserve this?
I'll never make it through another day.
I don't want to hear about anybody else's problems.
Everyone is a stranger. I feel totally alone.
I keep expecting to wake up and be healed.
Why me?"[2]
As we ask these all-too-human questions, we receive all-too-easy answers - spiritual clichés. We ought to make lemonade out of lemons. That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Time heals all wounds. You'll get over it. It was all God's will. These bromides from well-intentioned people we discover to be spiritually impoverishing when life is a broken arc.
So, when life is a broken arc, what do we make of it? What do we do with it?
First, we try to make sense of it. Theodicy is the technical theological term for trying to explain the ways of God to humanity. More broadly understood, it is simply the human inquiry into the age-old question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" One of the first explorations of that question was the biblical book of Job, a literary masterpiece.
Job was an upright and prosperous man who was buffeted with all manner of afflictions because of a wager between God and Satan. God was proud of Job, a faithful servant, but Satan bet that Job would become unfaithful if only he had to experience some of life's shadow times - sickness, poverty, death. God calls Satan's bluff and torments his creature. Job responds as human beings have over the millennia - he is angry and explodes, "why me? I've been good!"
In the original manuscript Job finally confesses his finitude before the Almighty - "though he slay me, yet will I trust him." A later group of biblical writers could not abide the righteous suffering without cause and so added a happy ending in which all was restored to Job with divine interest. But that was not the heart of Job - which has been called the "first anti-self-help book."[3] Suffering is inherent in life; we often can't help ourselves; we can but accept our fate and move on with courage.
What is this courage? The Buddhist author Perna Chodron wrote that, "When I was first married, my husband said I was one of the bravest people he knew. When I asked him why, he said because I was a complete coward but went ahead and did things anyhow."[4]
Buddhism responds to the human predicament of the broken arc by the first of its Four Noble Truths: life is suffering. Pain is part and parcel of the human condition. There is no point trying to evade or avoid it. In the Buddhist tradition there is the story of the "mustard seed medicine. A young mother carries a dead child to the Buddha and asks him to bring the child back to life. He requests that the woman go first into the village and gather mustard seeds from any home that had not known death. Of course, she returns empty-handed, realizes that death is universal, that she must accept it, bury her child and move on with living.
Humanity has developed many explanations for human suffering. One popular view is that God sends suffering to test us, gives us no more than we can handle. If we are worthy, we endure our suffering and are assured eternal bliss.
Nancy Mairs, a Unitarian Universalist woman with multiple sclerosis, has written insightfully about this issue. "Some people will say, 'God never gives us more than we can handle' - which I think is utter (expletive deleted). Because if God's doing the giving, then God routinely gives us much more than we can possibly handle - MS is one such thing. But I couldn't believe in a God who would do such a thing anyway. I don't know how people can practice a religious faith if they think of God doing such things."[5] I, too, find such a capricious God to be utterly unethical.
There is another philosophy of suffering which has a certain currency. God sends us suffering because we have been evil; God withholds suffering if we are good. That canard should have been rejected long ago - the Book of Job symbolizes its inadequacy. The lives of the martyrs and the deaths of the prophets should tell us how blasphemous a notion this is. From the crucifixion of Jesus to the assassinations of Ghandi and King, it is clear the righteous often suffer. From the oppressive pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the callously indifferent in our own time who profit from terrorism and war, it is clear the evil often prosper. We all know good people who suffer, and bad people who flourish. That easy equation of "do good and prosper" does not necessarily reflect reality.
A third school of thought brings us perhaps closer to the truth. Here it is maintained that suffering comes to us from an indifferent universe, a universe of merciless cause and effect - where we meet "a God of fierce indifference."[6] We can do nothing but recognize that we are part of the "fellowship who bear the mark of pain," as Albert Schweitzer so eloquently described it.
While I agree in part with this attitude, it is just a bit too passive for me. There is some suffering which can be and ought to be eliminated. There ought not be starvation in a world which can produce enough food for everyone. There ought not be poverty in a land of plenty. Much suffering can be ended. This leads to a fourth understanding of suffering, which resonates in the Unitarian Universalist universe. Suffering can and ought to be eliminated. Our task is to so order the world that human suffering will at least be minimized. We are a pro-active people; we are social activists; we want to change the world.
I agree, but I have come to understand that suffering is endemic in human life. No matter how much we strive to reduce it, it cannot be eliminated. We are finite creatures in an indifferent universe. When all is said and done, we die. Unitarian Universalists need to realize that however much we want to be in control of our destiny, in many ways we are helpless before the inexorable suffering that afflicts us; pain is the price we pay for living. Suffering is less a problem to be solved than a mystery to be lived.
Finally, suffering can be understood as an inherent part of the human condition and an essential source of life meaning. How we deal with inevitable suffering is one of the ways we find purpose in our lives.
Nancy Mairs, our fellow religionist stricken with MS, writes, "We see disability as a social construction .... I do not consider suffering an aberration, or an outrage to be eliminated at any cost .... It strikes me as intrinsic to the human condition. I don't like it. I'm not asked to like it. I must simply endure in order to learn from it. Those who leap forward to offer me aid in ending it, though they may do so out of the greatest compassion, seek to deny me the fullness of experience I believe I am meant to have."[7]
Victor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who spent years in a Nazi death camp, suggests that if we have a "why" to live, we can bear any "how" or "what." He found that in his struggling through his pain he created life meaning for himself. How we respond to our suffering is the last of the human freedoms.
It is, of course, dangerous to romanticize suffering as a source of life meaning. Baseball owner Bill Veeck debunks that notion when he says cynically: "Suffering is overrated. It doesn't teach you anything."[8] That is, of course, a possibility. We have known - or have ourselves been - persons who are embittered by the pain we experience. It can make us small; it can suck out the best in us; it can strip away the better angels of our nature. Intellectually we know we should not be bitter, that we should transmute our pain into courage, that we should learn from our suffering, that we should even teach out of our hurt. But that is hard business, and we all know it.
Last week I heard an interview on National Public Radio with author/radio personality Studs Terkel. Bob Edwards was speaking with him about his new book on death, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? It is vintage Terkel, a book of interviews and stories about how people face and deal with death. His own wife of 60 years died just months after he began writing. Terkel calls himself an agnostic, which he defines as a "cowardly atheist," but his words are those of faith, and his spirit carries over the radio waves. He kept insisting his book was really more about life than about death. As the interview, full of humor and pathos, concluded, Terkel spoke about his next book. It is to be about hope, though he is not sure he will be around to finish it. Studs Terkel is 89. If we need models of how we face our finitude and live in hope, there he is.
I have come to four conclusions about life as a broken arc: (1) Pain, suffering, discouragement, death are part of the landscape of being human. Some suffering belongs to the "structure of things" and is part of our fate, like death. There is nothing we can do about it. Some suffering is humanly caused; we can and ought to alleviate these self-inflicted hurts for ourselves and for others, we must face up to the fact life is messy. Some problems can never be solved. Some hurts are never healed. There are no cosmic baby-sitters. That is the hard truth of being human.
"A little boy one day asked the great preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick "why it was that God put all the vitamins in spinach and not in ice cream. Dr. Fosdick replied that he did not know why but that life is just that way."[9] (2) I matter. You matter. We all matter, and so do our hurts. Therefore, as we sit together on "humanity's mourning bench"[10] we need to listen to those voices from our own center which enable us to muster the passion to endure. Poet Ann McCracken reminds us, "The broken heart still beats."
(3) There is an old German saying that suffering shared is suffering halved. We can live with any pain if we live in a caring community. None of us can do it out there all alone. That spiritual truth is symbolized by our own simple ritual of joys and sorrows. By lighting that candle and speaking to our own beloved community, we know we are not alone.
(4) There is a horizon beyond our immediate experience, a greater context in which we live and move and have our being. Understanding ourselves in the larger picture of cosmos and history and community helps us gain perspective on our lives, helps us heal. In our best moments we find meaning in the wounds inflicted upon us.
Sometimes that perspective is gained through poetry. Unitarian Universalist poet Pesha Gertler, puts it this way in "The Healing Time."
"Finally on my way to yes I bump into all the places where I said no to my life
all the untended wounds - the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages that send me down the wrong street again and again
where I find them - the old wounds - the old misdirections
and I lift them one by one close to my heart and I say holy Holy."[11]
Sometimes that perspective comes to us through humor. Years ago I read about a lost cat ad in a British newspaper - "old, mangy, one-eyed, limped, neutered, crippled. Answers to the name 'Lucky.'" That ad may seem contradictory, but in a larger sense, with all our pain and suffering, with all our discouragement and depression, with our finitude as ever-present background, we are "lucky" to be alive, lucky to have an opportunity to grow a soul; lucky to share the ministry of pain; lucky to be able to transmute the "eternal severities" into meaning; lucky to live in the embrace of a broken arc.
And so, I leave you with the words of the poet Rumi:
"Come, come whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving, come.
Come, though you have broken your vow a thousand times.
Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, yet again, come."[12]
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