One thing that baffles me is the people who say they believe everything happens for a reason, but do not find the thought paralyzing. When something “character building” happens in my life, I want to believe there’s a reason for it too. It’s not that I don’t understand the impulse. But I do ultimately find the thought paralyzing.
It’s paralyzing to consider what the reason is, for example. This amounts to me trying to understand the mind of God or the ways of the universe or what the computerized simulation game controller is expecting of me or whatever. I mean, that’s what the people who say this mean, right? They are suggesting there is a divinity and that divinity has a plan and that plan involves every detail of every day of every person’s life. That every second or nanosecond every particle in existence is moving exactly where it should be. Yikes. It clearly begs the question of our freedom of choice. Strangely, then, those same people who say everything happens for a reason will also tell you that your choices are yours to make and that they have consequences both on this side of and beyond the grave. I’m not sure how they find the two thoughts compatible.
Nor am I sure how they think they know what happens beyond the grave. Again, I understand that there seems to us to be a life force coursing through us, something ineffable, and that because we are moving about inside our individual consciousnesses we feel certain they must remain intact somehow, somewhere once we die. I do understand the impulse to believe these things. But the fact is that no one really knows.
I was raised Lutheran: baptized, confirmed, an acolyte, and so on. By sixteen, however, I was asking, “So how do we know everything happens for a reason? How do we know what happens when we die?” In college, I minored in religion and took a year-long course in the Traditions of Western Christianity. We read Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Augustine, Paul Tillich, Karl Bultmann, Mary Daly, and so on. I studied Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism – dharma, anatta, and so on, and the more I read, the more it became apparent these were all theories. No one knows.
At the end of the day, to me, what suggests something greater is at work here is my empirical experience of the world. At the risk of sounding like an apologist for Intelligent Design (which should NOT be taught in public schools where evolution SHOULD be taught), there does seem to be a design that I experience in a mystical sense. The poem that best captures this sense is my favorite Robert Frost poem, his sonnet “Design”:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
In Frost, design is very real, but it is not particularly comforting. “What but design of darkness to appall?” The design Frost sees in this poem is dark and horrifying, even if it serves as a contrast by which we can see good.
Ultimately, I’m not sure why people find the idea of design comforting. What do we know of the designer? That he or she or they or it allows natural disasters and disease and suffering? There is something truly frightening in the idea of design. Whether we are trapped in a Matrix, a computer-simulated game, a postlapsarian Judeo-Christian world, or whatever, we are trapped within certain natural laws that govern this place, and some of those laws are brutal. Don’t get me wrong. Planet Earth is a beautiful place, and I am very happy to have the opportunity to be here. The design I see is awe-inspiring at times, has a sense of humor at others, but sometimes, its capacity for cruelty is not exactly reassuring. Here’s hoping that’s for a reason.
Comments