Dan and Hannah Began to Make Sense of Life’s Challenges

For some seven or eight years, I have read to my friend Vin two to three times per week at his place, a mile down the hill from our home of thirty years on Chases Pond Road.  Vin is feisty, full of life, and always very appreciative of my visits.   We must have read 50 books or more together.  There were Italian murder mysteries by Andrea Camilleri, spell binders by John Grisham, and my personal favorite, Barbara Kingsolver, among others.  Over 90 and blind for the last 30 years, Vin makes me feel like a long lost friend each time I come to read.  We should all be so lucky to have a friend like Vin.

We’ve just begun a new book, Seasons of Life: A football star, a boy, a journey to manhood (2003) by Jeffrey Marx, that has fully engaged us both from the outset.  Have you ever read a poem that you just wanted to make your own by memorizing it, especially, if the poem is only four lines long?  On page 19 is such a poem by Edwin Markham

There is a destiny that makes us brothers;

None goes his way alone:

All that we send into the lives of others

Comes back into our own.

On the very next page the main character, a former Baltimore Colt Joe Ehrmann, who is dealing with the death of his younger brother, asks these personal and rhetorical questions.    If there truly is a God who loves us, how could he allow this to happen?  How can there be so much suffering and so much unfairness in this world?  What is the purpose of life?  Where does real meaning – real value – come from?  The above poem provides him with a starting point to make sense of his personal tragedy.

   

For me these questions have a text-to-self connection.  In the 1980s our daughter Robyn was diagnosed with leukemia.  Though she is a happy, upbeat thirty-year-old now, at the time, the diagnosis blew Hannah and me away.  What in time helped me deal with her illness was a newly articulated understanding of God.  It helped make sense of her life threatening illness and, in part, might help answer Joe’s questions above.  


I don’t believe God chose for Joe's brother to die or that God is the reason for so much suffering and unfairness in the world.  The seeds of my understanding were planted in Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  Paraphrasing, Rabbi Kushner felt there were two universal laws: one, there are natural laws.  That is, a good person or not, if one gets injured during a tornado, it has to do with natural laws since tornadoes are caused when different temperatures and humidity meet to form thunderclouds.  It is not some sort of judgment whether the person was good or bad.  Second, people have free will.  They can make choices and do make good ones, great ones, bad ones, and evil ones. 

A hurricane is not an Act of God as the insurance companies and newscasters say.  It is an Act of Nature.  The “Act of God” is the help and support that comes from others to mitigate the loss of all who have suffered during the hurricane. 

I believe the Quaker notion that there is a little God in each of us.  And regularly I see the face of God in the people I meet who are doing good, day in and day out.