Why?

In the 1990s I was the pastor of a small Baptist church in the centre of Toulouse. One of the members was an immigrant called Alika, who was bringing up three young children by herself. She was doing a great job with them, and one summer she accompanied them to a Christian children’s camp in the hills behind Marseille.

When they came back to Toulouse, it was clear that something was wrong with David, her older boy, who was ten years old. Not long afterwards, Linda took Alika and David off to the hospital, and they were gone for an ominously long time. When the news arrived, it was the very worst: David had a brain tumour.

We did our best to help the little family over the next few months, but the most advanced treatment available was not good enough, and David continued deteriorating. My main memory of that time is of the bewildered Alika, who became obsessed with one question: “Why?” There had to be a reason for what had happened; perhaps she felt that if she could find the cause, she would somehow have more control over what was happening. So she blamed herself for taking him off to camp; there had been too much activity, his brain must have been scrambled by the busy-ness, something must have gone wrong in all the excitement and confusion. She should not have let him go there. It was her fault.

I did my best to persuade her that tumours don’t work that way; that it had almost certainly been growing inside his head from well before the time of the camp, and that the cause had to do with rogue cells running amok.

All to no avail: every time I saw Alika, she remained full of self-recrimination, always asking "Why?" In the end, I remember saying to her “You are asking the wrong question; there is no answer to all your whys. The answer you have found, that it is your fault, is definitely not the right one. It’s no one’s fault.” (Looking back, I can see that I was giving her well-meaning rational advice which failed to engage with her deep emotional trauma - but that’s another story).

David died, and I took the funeral; I struggled to hold back tears as I looked at that small casket and the devastated little family in the front pew. At the graveside service, men in blue overalls leaned on their shovels beside a heap of clay and waited. The “THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!” as we walked away came from clods of earth landing onto the coffin lid. The French don’t mess about with artificial turf covering up the reality of mud and grime in a graveyard - or at least they didn’t in 1994. Each thump seemed to be a question mark punctuating Alika’s whys.

People do try to find reasons for the random awful stuff that happens to them and to those they love. One of the most devastating notions is that suffering is a punishment. Like Alika, they think someone is to blame, usually themselves. This comes in several forms. Perhaps it is God punishing them for unnamed sins committed in their life; or perhaps they are carrying specific guilt for a decision they made, and feel that they deserve the accidents and sickness and death that the Universe sends, uninvited, towards them.

Eastern forms of reincarnation are also punitive by nature; the idea of karma is that you get your reward or your come-uppance in your next life for what happened in an earlier one. So if, say, you are born in India as a Dalit, an Untouchable, then you are destined to clean sewers all your life to atone for sins you can not remember because they happened in another life. Or you are born as a wealthy privileged Brahmin because in a previous life your good karma outweighed the bad.

I’m ferociously opposed to this notion that suffering is some sort of retribution, and I can back up my opinion from an impeccable source: Jesus himself. Back in first century Palestine, it was common knowledge that if you were sick, or the victim of an accident, it was your own fault, or perhaps your parents’. But Jesus - and this is part of his genius - rejected those beliefs flatly. Speaking about eighteen people who were killed by a collapsing tower, he denied any link between their behaviour and the disaster which happened to them. Same thing when a blind man was brought to him, and the people asked “Who sinned, this guy or his parents, that he should be born sightless?” “Neither” said Jesus. He offered no explanation for why people suffer, but he certainly dismissed the idea that suffering was a punishment for specific wrongdoing. He was much more interested in alleviating pain than in explaining it.

Some Christians ignore his words in their haste to interpret events. I once received an email about Hurricane Katrina and the devastation in Louisiana; the writer was suggesting that God had tiptoed away because of the wicked ways of modern America, such as abortion, homosexuality, and the abandoning of traditional values, and that we should therefore no longer be surprised if He stopped protecting the nation from disasters of all kinds. I trashed the email, because I believe that weather is just weather. I also believe that earthquakes are just plate tectonics, so that the quarter of a million people who perished in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami around the Indian Ocean no more deserved their fate than anyone else; it was a random disaster, not some judgment from God or the Universe. Trying to find divine meaning in the caprices of nature is a fool’s game.

There are bogus religious explanations for all sorts of evils, and it is a lasting shame to many church people that they saw the advent of AIDS in the 80s as a judgement from God against homosexuals, and indulged in schadenfreude rather than engaging in charitable relief work for the victims. Just this week, a well-known New Zealand preacher has suggested a link between severe earthquakes in the South Island and the country's acceptance of gays; he has rightly drawn down a storm of protest and disgust upon himself.

Suffering is not a punishment. If it is, most of the wrong people get punished, and many of those who should be punished get away very lightly. If you are suffering, it is not because you deserve it (unless of course it is possible to trace a direct link between self-destructive activity and harmful consequences, as for example with smoking or drink-driving). No one deserves to go through the sort of agony that Alika had to face as she watched her son fade away.

As for the ideas of reincarnation and karma, the existence of the highly unjust caste system in India should be enough to discredit them. There is a fatalistic resignation about it all: if I find myself in the wretched position of being a Dalit, I deserve it. I may have no memories of the evil which I committed in an earlier life, and for which I am now being punished, but there is no escape from this misery right here. This seems cruel and irrational to me. As with other forms of the “suffering-as-punishment” theme, it doesn’t stack up.

There is a more palatable answer to the question of suffering with which I can go a certain way, although it too has its limits. This is the notion of suffering as a means to growth. We all know the expression “No gain without pain”; and then there is Hemingway’s famous quote “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places”; or again Nietzsche: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger”.

When people exercise at the gym, the movement and stress damages their muscle fibres. As those micro-injuries heal, the muscles become thicker and stronger, and the biceps and glutes and abs start to swell out: the 110-pound weakling is on his way to becoming Mr Universe (for some reason that never happened to me - can’t imagine why…) These simple principles of physical development can be applied to growth of all sorts: emotional, social, spiritual. People talk about the “School of Hard Knocks” and there is certainly plenty of truth in the old folk wisdom. Tough experiences are necessary to become a mature person, which is why the modern bubble-wrapping helicopter-parent phenomenon is so worrying.

An early Christian theologian called Irenaeus talked about this world as a “valley of soul-making”. He thought we were born into God’s image, but that we had to grow, through our suffering, through painful and difficult experiences of all kinds, into the true likeness of God. He has inspired a number of modern thinkers, and one of the texts I had to study with my philosophy students was John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love. Hick tries to revive Irenaeus’ ideas for a modern readership, so that we interpret the hardships which come to us as opportunities to enhance our humanity, and become better people.

This is all very good, and makes perfect sense up to a point: but it runs into problems as the suffering intensifies. In a previous reflection I mentioned those cattle trucks loaded with children headed for the gas chambers of Auschwitz - or to extermination centres such as Treblinka or Sobibor. Our notions of suffering as a means to growth hit their limits very quickly when we try to imagine the terror and bewilderment of these doomed children. A certain dose of pain can lead to good things; but so much of the agony encountered by human beings seems to be diabolically and unrelentingly destructive, with no redeeming features.

Once again I am left with no satisfactory answer.

So what about me? I’m 63, and dying of cancer. Under ordinary circumstances, I could hope to reach the average life expectancy for a New Zealand male, which is 80 years old; and of course I might then be greedy and hope for an extra five, or ten, or, why not, fifteen years. Why is this happening to me? And why is it happening to our family yet again, fourteen years after our youngest daughter Becky was diagnosed with a lethal brain tumour? Why do Linda and Chris and Steph, and my wider family and friends, have to go through all that awful grief once more?

The simplest answer is that there are almost certainly genetic weaknesses on my mother’s side of the family. My maternal grandmother died of a brain tumour in 1928, when Mum was two years old. Then Mum’s brother died of a brain tumour, and within three months, his son was also taken in the same way. Another cousin died of breast cancer, and several aunties or cousins have had mastectomies. Mum herself had lung cancer; I had a nearly-lethal melanoma in 2010. And of course there was Becky, and now me.

Some families are absolutely cancer-free, going back for generations. Some, like ours, are riddled with it. It’s just bad luck, bad genes. To quote Forrest Gump, shit happens, and trying to understand why it happens is futile. As my friend Mike Riddell once said “Suffering is not a problem to be solved, it is a burden to be carried”.

At the moment I am having to deal with moments of intense sadness, and other emotions such as anger. "Bloody cancer! Why can't it be someone else this time?!" These feelings are pretty normal when you are faced with early death. But in the end “Why me?” is a self-centred question: there is a sort of resentment embedded in it, and although I allow myself to feel the force of it, I don't want it to take over and turn me into a bitter person. (This resolve will be put to the test as the disease takes over. I don’t know how I’ll react then, and maybe I will end up, in spite of everything, eating my noble-sounding words, and succumb to wailing out “Why me?” I hope not.)

When Becky was sick, an American Episcopalian priest called John Claypool, who lost his daughter to leukaemia, wrote to me: “I have no words of explanation, only sadness. The most helpful thing for me was recognising that Laura was a gift, not a possession. The only thing more mysterious than her death at ten years of age was her birth. I never deserved that windfall; therefore I choose to be grateful for the time we did have rather than resentful that it ended all too soon.”

Gratitude in the middle of terminal illness? Is he kidding us? No, he’s not. He has no explanation for the “Why?” questions, so he asks “How?” How can I avoid bitterness, and how can I find meaning in what has happened? And his answer to that question is to be grateful, not resentful. That sounds like a tough assignment, and I’m not sure how long I can stick with it. But it’s the way I’m hoping to cope.

As for “why?”, I think the best answer is probably the one Mum used to give me when I was a kid: “Because Y is a crooked letter, and Z is no better!”