The second path (Tracks of a Fellow Struggler -- Part 2)

Having said that, however, I need to hasten on to identify a second dead-end route, lest I badly confuse you. It is what I call the “road of total intellectual understanding,” the way of explaining everything completely or tying up the loose ends in a tidy answer. To be sure, I have just said that I believe some day God will be able to give an account for what he has done and show how it all fits together, but that eschaton is not now. Accordingly, any attempt at this moment to absolutize or to find an answer that will account for all the evidence will either end in failure or be a real distortion of reality.

I perhaps need to confess to you that at times in the last few months I have been tempted to conclude that our whole existence is utterly absurd. More than once I looked radical doubt full in the face and honestly wondered if all our talk about love and purpose and a fatherly God were not simply a veil of fantasy that we pathetic humans had projected against the void. For you see, in light of the evidence closest at hand, to have absolutized at all would have been to conclude that all was absurd and that there was no Ultimate Purpose. There were times, for example, when Laura Lue was hurting so intensely that she had to bite on a rag and used to beg me to pray to God to take away that awful pain. I would kneel down beside her bed and pray with all the faith and conviction of my soul, and nothing would happen except the pain continuing to rage on. Or again, that same negative conclusion tempted when she asked me in the dark of the night: “When will this leukemia go away?” I answered “I don’t know, darling, but we are doing everything we know to make that happen.” Then she said: “Have you asked God when it will go away?” And I said: “Yes, you have heard me pray to him many times.” But she persisted: “What did he say? When did he say it would go away?” And I had to admit to myself he had not said a word! I had done a lot of talking and praying and pleading, but the response of the heavens had been silence.

But though in moments like that I was tempted to absolutize about life and arrange all existence around that principle, clearer moments made me realize that such simplicity would not correspond to reality. For you see, along the utter absurdity of what was happening to this little girl were countless other experiences that were full of love and purpose and meaning. From people in the clinic and at the hospital, from unnumbered hosts of you the church and the community, came evidences of goodness that were anything but absurd. And I realized that if I were going to judge it all fairly, this data had to be balanced in equal weight alongside the darkness.

I was reminded of a conclusion I came to a long time ago: that you do not solve all the intellectual problems by deciding that everything is absurd. To be sure, it is hard to account for evil on the assumption that God is all-good and all-powerful, but if you do go away with that assumption and go to the other extreme, you are then left with the problem of how to account for all the goodness and purpose that most assuredly also exist. This leads me to conclude that expecting to find one total explanation or answer to this situation is futile.

Never has the stark paradox of real darkness alongside of real light been more apparent to me than in the last days, which means I shall continue to ask questions, but not expect, in history at least, to find an answer. George Buttrick is right in saying that life is essentially a series of events to be borne and lived through rather than intellectual riddles to be played with and solved. Courage is worth ten times more than any answer that claims to be total. We cannot absolutize in such a way that either the darkness swallows up the light or the light the darkness. To do so would be untrue to our human condition that “knows in part” and does all its seeing “as through a glass darkly.”

For me, at least, then, the roads called unquestioning resignation and total understanding hold no promise of leading out of the darkness where I lost my child.