Stuff happens. Good stuff and bad stuff. But what explains it? Can it be explained?
Two cartoons, representing two quite different approaches to those questions. In the first, which is a Non Sequitur cartoon, a man and woman are at the end of a hiking trail. A sign says, “Welcome to Bear Woods Hiking Trails: Warning! Stuff Happens.” Apparently the woman has come to fetch her husband at the end of his hike. The man’s arm is badly out of joint, and it looks as though the bottom part of his right leg has been chewed on. The woman says to him, with obvious disgust, “Well, how much more of a warning did you need?” Some misfortunes just happen, but some we could have avoided. He obviously didn’t do that.
The second cartoon is from Peanuts. Linus asks Charlie Brown, “If you have a problem in your life, do you believe you should try to solve it right away or think about it for a while?” Charlie Brown answers, as we would expect, “Oh, think about it …by all means. I believe you should think about it for a while.” Linus asks, “To give yourself time to do the right thing about the problem?” “No,” says Charlie Brown, “to give it time to go away!”
When misfortune strikes, is it best to try to ignore it, or to face it head-on? Last week we learned that everything and everyone cherished by Job were obliterated in one disastrous day. But, according to the agreement which had been made between God and Satan, nothing could happen to Job’s person. In Chapter 2, however, God assures Satan that Job will not turn against God, even if he is attacked by the forces of Satan’s devilish deeds. Having complete confidence in Job, God tells the devil he has permission physically to assault Job. Satan does, and Job is afflicted with what are described as “loathsome sores,” which usually has been interpreted as carbuncle boils. Anyone who has had boils knows how very painful and persistent they are.
In the midst of all this, Job’s wife acted like a real sweetheart. She said to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God, and die.” Nice lady. Voted Most Popular in her Isfahan High School Class of 1751 BCE.
Job always knew that stuff happens, meaning bad stuff. But after the opening chapters of this, the first of the books in the Wisdom section of the Hebrew Bible, Job knew as no one else could, just how painfully true it is that stuff happens. Misfortunes assail everyone. “You speak as one of the foolish women,” Job told his wife. “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” However, Job likely makes a faulty assumption there, which is that it is solely God who causes both misfortune and good luck. But, as Sportin’ Life sang in Porgy and Bess, “It ain’t necessarily so.” Sometimes stuff happens for no discernible reason at all.
Stephen Hawking, the amazing physicist and cosmologist, was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, when he was 21 years old. He was told that he had at most two and a half years to live. Now, 51 years later, he is still mentally as active as ever. However, for years he has been unable to speak or move, except for small movements of his fingers. Nevertheless he has written several outstanding scholarly books by means of a computer designed especially for him. He has lived far longer than any other ALS patient in history, I suspect.
Is Stephen Hawking’s illness an enormous misfortune, or is it a stroke of ironic good luck? I think he would deem it a colossal misfortune for him, but it represents an odd example of good fortune for the rest of us. A fellow physicist said that because he has been able to write only very slowly, even with the help of his computer, he is able to formulate scientific theories in his mind that circumvent ways that every other physicist thinks about problems. His ALS forced him to see solutions in his brain which others cannot visualize, because that is the only way for him to make fairly rapid progress in his extremely complicated field of endeavor.
Is it misfortune or is it good luck that your daughter or son married whom they married? For that matter, is it good luck or misfortune for your son- or daughter-in-law that they married your children? Does misfortune and good luck exist mainly in the eye of the beholder, or are they objective realities?
When the South Korean ferry encountered the strong currents which shifted the cargo and caused the ship quickly and disastrously to tilt, the third mate was by herself at the wheel on the bridge. Apparently she had never before steered the ship alone. Was it a serious breach of duty for the captain to have her in control in such a dicey situation? It was obviously a huge misfortune that the majority of the passengers died, but was it also good luck that anyone survived? Where was God when the ferry passed into the turbulent waters?
We were in Lancaster, Pennsylvania several weeks ago. As we usually do, we went to visit one of Lois’s professors from college and his wife. Because she has stage-4 lymphoma plus a bladder that has shut down, we were not able to see her. Without question John would attribute her situation to a great misfortune, if only because he is a self-professed yet outstanding agnostic or atheist. And they both are outstanding human beings dealing with a very difficult situation.
Nobody who is sixty years of age or over will ever forget that John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. It is a misfortune of chronology that two famous Brits also died on that day, but at the time they never received the proper recognition of what they had accomplished in life. C.S. Lewis taught literature at both Oxford and Cambridge, but it was his books about Christianity which secured him a permanent place as one of the most influential Christian writers of the last century. Aldous Huxley is most famous for his futuristic novel Brave New World, which has been assigned to millions of students on both sides of the Atlantic for many years. But because both Lewis and Huxley happened to die on the same day as JFK, their deaths received far fewer accolades than otherwise would have been the case. Stuff happens.
Last Sunday afternoon I attended the Holocaust Memorial service here at Congregation Beth Yam. Several people spoke about family members who either had survived or died in the Holocaust, and some teenagers read very powerful poems written by Jewish poets recalling what many people believe is the most horrendous event in four thousand years of Jewish history. A woman named Talia Block wrote a poem called While Bouncing the Shema Back and Forth in Shul. Its last stanza says, We were there, God/ When the life of your Holy People/ Was silently diffused/ Into gas/ and their spirits chased/ Into ovens. And where were You?/ (Uva Yom hashevii Shabbat va-Yinafsh?/ “And on the seventh day God rested?)
A middle-aged lady told of her parents, both of whom fled from Germany before the war began. He father would and did speak of the Holocaust, but her mother would not, and could not. One fateful day she was stopped by a neighbor on her way home from school. The neighbor told her not to go home, and to run away. Her whole family had been taken away early that afternoon. As a result, her mother could never again trust anyone, and she became a complete emotional cripple for the rest of her life. Terrible stuff happens.
Several weeks ago there was lengthy story in The New Yorker (The Reckoning by Andrew Solomon, March 17, 2014) based on the first interview given by Adam Lanza’s father. Adam Lanza, you will recall, was the teenager from Newtown, Connecticut, who shot his mother and then killed over twenty elementary students and teachers in the Sandy Hook School. Peter Lanza told the writer of the story, “I get very defensive with my name. I do not like even to say it. I thought about changing it, but I feel like that would be distancing myself and I cannot distance myself. I don’t let it define me, but I felt like changing the name is sort of pretending it didn’t happen and that’s not right.” Tragically, terrible things do happen. The saddest words in this very somber story are found in the last paragraph. “Peter declared that he wished Adam had never been born, that there could be no remembering who he was outside of who he became.” Were we Peter Lanza, would we also come to that conclusion? “After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. And Job said: ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night which said, “A man-child is conceived”’” (Job 3:1-3). Unspeakable things happen.
Is there anything we can do to try to obliterate misfortunes? According to statistics, it is a greater misfortune to be born poor in the United States of America than in many other developed countries, because it is harder for young Americans to break out of the cycle of poverty than for many other nationalities. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times recently wrote an editorial called “The Compassion Gap.” He said, “A Pew survey this year found that a majority of Republicans, and almost one-third of Democrats, believe that if a person is poor the main reason is ‘lack of effort on his or her part.’” Mr. Kristof readily acknowledged that the poor sometimes are lazy and irresponsible. But, said he, with typical Kristofian candor, “So are the rich, with less consequence.” He ended by saying, “Johnny shouldn’t be written off at the age of 3 because of the straw he drew in the lottery of birth. To spread opportunity, let’s start by pointing fewer fingers and offering more helping hands.”
An elderly English member of the House of Lords has spent her life doing just that. Baroness Caroline Cox has devoted herself to – as she says -- “reaching the parts (of the world) that other aid agencies don’t reach.” She refuses to allow misfortune to determine a bleak future for anyone if she can possibly help it. She was in Nagorno-Karabakh, a Christian Armenian enclave given by Stalin to Muslim Azerbaijan. One time the helicopter in which she was riding was peppered by shots from the ground. Another time the jeep in which she was a passenger was shelled, and one shell lifted up the whole back end of the jeep. She said, with both humor and fearlessness, “We were saved by two miracles – a brilliant Armenian driver and a lousy Azeri gunner.” (From a report in The Times of London)
In the midst of misfortune there can be good luck. And in the midst of good luck there can be misfortune. Things happen in both directions. For no one is life entirely misfortune or good luck, but into every life both make many entrances and exits.
Over the past year I have been receiving peculiar and enigmatic letters from a high school classmate. In our school we had a tradition at Madison West High School in Wisconsin of not two but three speakers at graduation: a valedictorian, a salutatorian, and a class orator. All three of them no doubt had straight A’s from 9th grade on. How they were selected for the various positions or who did the selecting I don’t remember, but all three had brains coming out their ears. The valedictorian got a Ph.d. in some kind of biotech science, and became a principal in a California pharmaceutical company. The salutatorian became an occupational therapist on the brain injury team at the Rehabilitation Institute of Oregon in Portland.
It is from the orator that I have been receiving my letters. Ted Odell was a brilliant if unorthodox student, and always a gentle prince among men. He was a tall redhead who was on our intramural basketball team. With Ted as our center, nobody was going to move him out of his assigned spot. He was an immovable object under the basket. He didn’t always score a lot of points, but he moved a lot of people around with devoted dispatch and kept them from scoring.
Ted attended Harvard, but dropped out, I suspect for many of the same reasons as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg; it just wasn’t sufficiently challenging. Then eventually he came back to Madison, and finished his degree at the University of Wisconsin, with much brow-beating encouragement from high school friends. There he met a Chinese woman, whom he married, and they started a small business enterprise selling what Ted marketed as Guerrilla Cookies, spelled g-u-e-r-r-i-l-l-a, meaning, in Spanish, “little warrior.” Apparently they were the kind of nutritious fare eaten by revolutionaries in Cuba and Central America. Ted was part of the anti-war movement in Madison, which was as strong there as anyplace in the country.
Later, Ted dropped out of society altogether (by then he and Ling were divorced), and he went to live in an unheated hut without electricity on some land outside Brodhead, Wisconsin, which his family had long owned. A regular Thoreau, he was. He was there for years until recently he moved to Janesville, Wisconsin (which is where Paul Ryan is from, but that has nothing to do with this), and now he is in some kind of residential facility for senior citizens.
Ted’s letters are written in pencil on the back of sheets of paper which he has gotten from here and there. They are fascinating, disjointed, humorous, sad epistles which suggest that a mental giant may somehow have lost his way. He may or may not have cancer; none of his letters has made that absolutely clear. I am a much better phone-talker than letter-writer, especially when I no longer have a secretary who is willing to transfer scads of words from a tape recorder onto naked foolscap. I have tried to get a phone number from Ted where I can call him, because he has no phone, but so far it hasn’t happened. If I could, I would go see Ted, and spend a few days with him, but I’m not sure what, if anything, it would accomplish. His letters are brilliant, melancholy, and alarming. He seems like misfortune personified, but I doubt that he sees it that way. I am equally delighted and dejected every time I hear from him.
I have told the following story before, but I’m going to do it again. George Matheson was a Scottish minister who fell in love with a beautiful young woman. They planned to be married, but a few weeks before the wedding, she called it off. Almost instantly he went blind. Such a psychosomatic situation happens infrequently, but in rare instances it has been known to happen. On the day a few years later when the young woman was scheduled to marry another man in Glasgow, George Matheson sat alone in the church manse in Helensburgh on the Firth of Clyde. In a burst of agonized inspiration he wrote a poem, which became the text of our final hymn today. It is, I think, one of the greatest hymns of praise to the God who never abandons anyone in the midst of any misfortunes, no matter how bleak. Think of the story as you sing it.
From misfortune can come devastating depression or utter dejection. But from it also can come great thoughts, great hopes, great lives. When trials come, how do we deal with them? And where do we turn?