Why do we suffer? The answer is a mystery
A year or two after his son Aaron died of progeria, a rare disease characterized by premature aging, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book about suffering. "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," first published in 1981, remains a best-seller which speaks not only to Jews, but to followers of religious traditions throughout the world.
The book deals with the unfairness and arbitrariness of suffering. It is not only the evil who suffer but the good. The opposite is also true: the evil often prosper while the good bear terrible trials. Life is not fair. But we already knew that.
I first read Kushner's book in 1985 during my father's final illness, when we still hoped he would live, and I've read it several times since, usually in times of distress. Bad things do happen to good people. It happens all the time. We shove this knowledge under the rug. We pretend the bad things are rare events or are in some way deserved or justified. But they're not.
Other creatures suffer too: This morning I came upon a black ant circling endlessly on the sidewalk, its legs crushed on one side. With a quick step, I put it out of its misery.
The underlying slimy, unanswerable question is "why?" Why should a child suffer? Why should an ant suffer?
Why should anyone or anything suffer? If only we could be presented with a reason. But there is no reason.
There is no excuse. There is no acceptable explanation.
Just when things are going well and we're sailing along whistling, under a blue sky, something unexpected and dreadful drops into our lives. Hurricane. Darfur. Tsunami. Earthquake. Cancer. Stroke. Diabetes. Car accident. Suddenly we're not whistling anymore and the sky is gray. Bad things happen. How should we deal with them? What should we think? How can we live in such an unpredictable, unfair world?
Focusing bad things on the biblical book of Job, Kushner notes that most readers think of God as fair and all-powerful—but they also think that Job is a good person. However, if God is fair, then why do the innocent suffer? And if God is all-powerful, why does He not put an end to suffering? This is a challenging intellectual puzzle. But in the midst of tragedy and loss, intellectual analyses are cold and insufficient.
We don't care what makes sense. We need comfort.
The people we truly care about, the ones whose suffering breaks our hearts, are those we know and love. We pray for them, we ask for special miracles. We ask God to break the rules for them. We all do it. I do it too. But don't we really want everybody to be spared the suffering? Why do bad things happen to anybody?
(Even Christian apologist CS Lewis couldn't find an excuse for the suffering of animals.)
Writers and philosophers throughout the ages have tackled this subject. In his newest book, "God's Problem," Bart Ehrman, chairman of the department of religion at UNC-CH, discusses biblical explanations for why we suffer. These explanations range from a belief that suffering is a punishment for sin; to a conviction that it is a test of loyalty; to a determination that suffering comes from evil cosmic forces; to a non-questioning acceptance of suffering as a mystery. This last is exemplified when God speaks to Job from out of the whirlwind: "Where were you when I planned the earth?. . .Were you there when I stopped the sea. . . and set it's boundaries?" (Job chapters 38,39)
Though Ehrman approaches the subject from an academic perspective and Kushner from a religious one, the authors' questions, answers, and non-answers are similar. Kushner abandons the idea that God is all-powerful and concludes that God walks by his side, unable to change the situation. All that we can do says Kushner, is to forgive and accept in love an imperfect, unfair world, knowing the world is also capable of great beauty and goodness. Ehrman, an agnostic, follows Ecclesiastes' like-minded advice: appreciate good things while you have them, for they will not last.
Each of us, I think, Christian or Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or other, must walk the path of sorrow alone, finding meaning where we can and help where others may not. Neither Kushner nor Ehrman accepts the "whirlwind" answer of God to Job—but I do. Heaven help me, I do. Maybe this diminishes me in the eyes of more critical thinkers, but I believe there's something—some God, some higher power, some universal life force—that we humans can't fathom. And when Death closes her black wings over the dead, I think they (we) become part of something huge and great and good.
But why do they — and we — suffer? I have no idea.
Maureen Parker lives in Greensboro.
