Let’s say you are a teen-age girl. Your mom gets you up in the morning to get ready for school. When you get to the kitchen, she looks bad. You say, “Where’s dad?” She says, “He’s gone, honey – and this time, I don’t think he’s coming back.” A black cloud comes over you and stays there the rest of your life. You are riding home at night with your loving husband. Coming around a curve, another car suddenly veers into yours, smashing the driver’s side. You wake up in the hospital, and ask, “Where is my husband?” A chaplain appears with a sad face and says, “I have some bad news.” A black cloud comes over you and stays there for the rest of your life. You are getting ready to teach your Sunday school class and your lovely wife comes in, sits on your lap, says, “I want a divorce,” and then walks back to the bedroom with her head hanging down. A black cloud comes over you and stays there the rest of your life. Your dad dies, and a few years later, your mom dies. Although you are an adult, you know that life will never be the same. Three hundred children go to school one morning. A mud slide buries the school and wipes out their village. For those mothers and fathers remaining, the pain sears like a knife and keeps cutting the rest of their lives. With all of these events, it feels as if all strength in our body drains out, leaving us limp, helpless, and lost. These most cherished parts of our support and love system have gone forever. They are most certainly never coming back.
The first reaction we all have is the same as Job and all others to whom calamities happen: “Why me, Lord?” Why does a kind, loving and just God allow such pain and misery to come into our lives, almost more than we can bear? For some, it is indeed more than they can bear. Some commit suicide, directly or indirectly. Others, for whom this is too much to bear, will lose all interest in learning, creating and giving, throwing their lives away on drugs and wasted time. Why does a kind, loving and just God push these people in pain over the edge, to a life of no value? Don’t tell us that it is all part of a grand plan that we are not smart enough to see. That doesn’t wash. Don’t tell us that children who see their mother raped and murdered before their eyes deserve that kind of horror because their kind and loving God has decreed it to be so. That doesn’t wash. Don’t tell us that massacres, plundering, looting, bombing and machete murders are part of our loving God’s grand plan for the human race. That doesn’t wash. The only inescapable conclusion we can reach is that there is not a loving personal God who is always looking out for our welfare. Calamities happen to humans just as they happen to all animals. That’s the way our universe runs. The only God that matters, the Laws of Chance, doesn’t care.
These moments of startling change are no different than any death, as far as our emotional reactions are concerned. We go through all those stages of compensation for this irrevocable loss. First, we deny it: “This can’t be happening to me.” Then we get angry; something this terrible has to be someone else’s fault. Then we start trying to make deals with whomsoever we think is the cause of our pain, thinking there has to be some way out of this terrible loss. Then we come to the realization that there is no way out and no one else we can make pay for our pain, so we get depressed. Lastly, if we have somewhere within us some reserves of strength left we didn’t know we had, we come to acceptance and move ahead with our lives. This is not to say that we all make it through all these stages of dealing with death. Many of us get only part way and stay there the rest of our lives, to the detriment of our personal health and detriment of the health of all those whose lives we touch.
Which brings us to a couple of pertinent concepts about dramatic life changes and catastrophic loss. One is that these things are going to happen to all of us. We can’t escape them. Some of us will have such horrible losses that we can’t make our way through them. Others of us will have such devastating loss that it would be impossible for any of us to escape without deep physical and/or emotional scars that distort and burn the rest of our lives, like a constant hell that we did not deserve. Not just bad, but horrible things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. Justice is off taking a nap during most of our lives. There is not a personal god who cares.
This means that we can’t leave it to some mysterious God to take care of preventing these disasters. The only God that matters has no plan for our lives and is not protecting us. It is up to us to prevent disasters. If there is any way we can stop cruelty, stop murders, stop genocide, stop religious fanatics from bombing and killing each other in the name of their mythical god, we should do so. It is up to us to create stable and loving societies that will resist and thwart crime. If we just sit back when horrible things happen to other people and say, “It is God’s will,” we are not fulfilling our obligations as citizens in a just society.
It follows that when some terrible loss happens to us, we need to be slow to blame and quick to recover. It is not a matter of if some terrible loss or hurt will hit us during our lives. It is only a question of when, how bad, and how often. These stunning, mind-numbing and overwhelming disasters are going to hit all of us many times during our lives. The only thing we can do is to handle them as courageously as possible. When the pieces are all laying on the floor, we need to pick them up, sort them out, find out which pieces we can still use and which pieces we need to get rid of as soon as possible. We need to look at each disaster as an opportunity to take a new direction in life, one we might not have considered before but now find is best. It is impressive how many times people who have looked rationally at their lives after a disaster, find new direction which is stimulating, productive and rewarding.
The mythology of a personal god who has a plan for all of us, allowing horrible things to happen to decent and loving people, is a societal disaster. That concept leads us to allow callous torture and murder of humans against humans. It leads us to lassitude in face of natural disasters, because it is “God’s will.” That’s a calamity. It isn’t up to any God to make a more stable and compassionate society. It is up to us.