Trying to Be as Honest about God as I Can Be

Arabella and I frequently attributed the fact that we managed to find peace, and even joy, during the last two years of pain and struggle and uncertainty to the fact that we got our theodicy(the problem of evil) in order in undergraduate school.  We took theology courses together at Duke with Dr. Thomas Langford.  Once my next-door-neighbor, when my family lived in Durham during my seventh- and eighth-grade years, Dr. Langford taught Duke undergraduates to begin to ask questions systematically and theologically.  He was a master teacher.  Several years later, he would officiate at our marriage.  However, in those courses, which certainly pertained neither to us as individuals nor to us as a couple nor even directly to mortality, Dr. Langford laid the foundations on which we built a marriage and on which we relied as the bedrock of hope when Arabella's illness raised the obvious questions.  How could a good God allow such suffering?  More specifically, how could a good God permit metastasizing cancer cells (as well as Haitian earthquakes, ethnic genocide, and tsunamis)?  How could a loving God nourish a love like ours, which illness and ultimately death could then so brutally cut short?  After two years of pancreatic cancer, with the continuous chemotherapy and what Arabella called its "indignities," how can one believe Jesus's words that "in my Father's house are many mansions" that he has prepared for each of us?  

These questions are the stuff of anguish, as well as the fuel for philosophical and theological consternation for millenia.  Dr. Langford taught Arabella and me that answers come most often in the context of the simplest stuff of life, stuff that looks like... well, merely like "stuff," not answer-material at all.  (Francis of Assisi would have agreed with Dr. Langford.)  So, I do not have grand conclusions and syntheses to offer, but only evidence that I glean from the realities of being a lover, a husband, a parent, and a friend. 

Above all, those roles have taught me that love IS suffering... not misery, you understand, but allowing ("Suffer the little children to come unto me")... suffering or allowing the other to be who he or she is, with all the glory and all the foolishness that comes with human personhood, simply because one loves the other.  Anyone who thinks that one can love without this suffering is deluding him- or herself... or has been extraordinarily lucky, like Job before his catastrophies.  Some people do have extraordinary luck.  It's not fair.  However, as a friend of mine recently said, "fairness" does not get one very far as an ethical framework in life's big questions, at lease not after the playground years.  Hence, in the United States, fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, and forty percent of children come into this world bereft of the stability of a family... because too many think that marriage will save them from suffering... or they avoid marriage, because they do not understand what suffering means, only that relationships involve it in some way they want to avoid.  Well, enough of that....

When I think of God, I think of a lover, for God is love... and, like every lover, God suffers his beloved to be who they are, whether He thinks that's good for them or not.   National Socialism, and cancer cells, and "hiking the Appalachian Trail"... all such things, failures of the flesh and spirit big and small, result from the freedom that God has installed at the heart of things, like a parent giving a sixteen-year-old the car keys.  To do things differently would involve a curtailment of freedom, would mean love's selling out to the will-to-power-and-control.  However, God does not need to protect Himself or His prerogatives, because God is love, the perfection and the end of love, full of compassion even for the metastasized abuse of freedom, even for the hubris of Goldman Sachs and of polluters-for-profit, even for me, a virtuoso in the Seven Deadly Sins.

Did God kill my wife by creating cancer?  Did God create the earthquakes that killed thousands of people's spouses (and children, and parents, and brothers, and sisters, and friends) in ten minutes, in one fell swoop?  Does God "take it in his stride" that I suffer now as I do?  Is it simply in the nature of things that "shit happens"?  No.  Such things are not "natural"'; they are deeply unnatural.  Ask any parent at the hospital bed of a dying child.  Ask any husband or wife who, to use C. S. Lewis' metaphor, has suffered the amputation that is the death of a spouse.  Ask any tortured prisoner in Tehran or Guantanemo.  Ask any fisherman who has seen the waters that generations have fished suddenly bereft of any promise of a catch.  Ask any unemployed auto worker whose wife with Lou Gehrig's disease cannot get health insurance... and therefore treatment.  Such things are deeply, deeply unnatural.  They are unnatural, because God, the source of nature, is love, not hatred and death.  We suffer each other's freedom.  We suffer our own freedom.  God suffers our freedom, because He loves us.  He loves the world... every cell of it, even if it decides cancerously to go its own way in a solipsistic myopia.

So, what should I make of these beliefs, in the midst of a hurt whose magnitude I never imagined?  Am I just blowing hot air?  No.  No.  No.

Last night I talked with my friend Sim about the rows of medications on my kitchen counter, which Arabella had so carefully organized as her assertion of life in the face of death, the last enemy.   Several days earlier, I had found the capacity to empty the bathroom medicine cabinet of the mouthwash-remedies for chemo mouth sores, the oitments for the chemo dry skin, the laxatives for chemo's assault on the digestive system.  "OK," I said to myself, "Now it's time to trash the medications in the kitchen."  However, when I picked up the first bottle of chemo-poison, I could not bring myself to toss it.  Like leaving Arabella in the hospital each night, it felt like betrayal to touch those armaments against illness.  I wept at the thought.

However, Sim, a hospital chaplain, had told me that, for safety's sake, I had to get rid of those hundreds of pills.  Nobody could use them.  Arabella had no further need of them.  After talking with him, I sat with my head in my hands for a half-hour or so.  Then calmly, resolutely, I marched into the kitchen.  I unscrewed each bottle cap and poured the contents into the trash can, followed by each empty amber bottle... twenty-five or so.  Thousands of dollars of medication into the waste can.  It hurt like crazy.  "... but I wanted them to work!" I cried.  "YOU wanted them to work!  Our beloved Dr. Sherman wanted them to work!  God wanted them to work!"  ... and they did work... for two years... until cancer's freedom, Arabella, won over the freedom of our love, of your love for life, for me!

After I poured the pill bottles' contents into the trash, I heard... very clearly I heard... the "Arabella voice," which speaks constantly to me,  say .... the voice said simply, "Thank you."  I felt so clearly, Arabella, that you needed to be freed of those things that spoke only of illness, of suffering, of death.  You don't need those things any longer.  Neither do I.... neither do I.... although I wish so much that those pills had worked for a longer time... any length of time longer.... so I could have put off this anguish for a while longer.   However, that's my selfishness talking again.  I know.  I do know.  Really, I do know this.