Wednesday
A passage from a Stephen King novel returns to me from time to time as I think back to when we lost our oldest son 26 years ago. It was a fluke accident since normally Church Point on Maryland’s St. Mary’s River is a safe place to swim. In fact, we had taken Justin and his brothers to swim there many times when they were children. An abnormally wet spring had created dangerous currents, however, and one of them grabbed him and that was that.
To be sure, he had taken a slight risk. He jumped in fully clothed and wearing heavy leather boots. It was a strange enough action that some people, wondering what he was doing in the cold water, thought it a suicide attempt. When we talked to witnesses and people he had seen earlier in the day, however, we realized it was anything but. For the first time in months, the day was beautiful and he was feeling effervescent. Filled with the holy spirit (Easter had been the week before and he was an enthusiastic Christian), he ran up to the cross that overlooks the river, kissed it, and launched himself into the water. It was like a Baptismal cleansing.
In fact, we heard from someone that he had done this once before, emerging soaked and joyous.
I want to focus on the risk part, however, because that is what has me thinking of the Stephen King passage. In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, nine-year-old Trish McFarland at one point asks her father if he believes in God. In reply, he first tells her what he doesn’t believe:
I don’t believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die—I don’t want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created…
Then, however, he adds,
..but I believe there has to be something.
After a pause, he continues:
Yeah, something. Some kind of insensate force for the good….I think there’s a force that keeps drunken teenagers—most drunken teenagers—from crashing their cars when they’re coming home from the senior prom or their first big rock concert.
He goes on to add other examples—a force that keeps most planes from crashing and that has preserved the world from nuclear conflagration—but it’s the first example that has stayed with me over the years. And not only because that force failed to protect Justin.
I think of my own leaps. I was hiking with my niece at Morgan’s Steep this past weekend, a lovely overlook in Sewanee that, at one point, features an almost vertical rock face around thirty feet high. I recalled climbing it, without a rope and wearing only Keds tennis shoes, when I was 11 or 12. There are enough holds, not evident from ground, that make the climb possible. Nevertheless, one slip and I could have easily been seriously injured or even killed.
I think also of a moment when, as a college kid, I crossed the highest level of the Roman aqueduct in Nimes, France. People weren’t supposed to be up there—one had to tiptoe between huge holes and a false step would have meant certain death—but it was there so my friends and I did it.
Although I can come up with two examples, for the most part I was a cautious kid. I think of risk takers far more adventurous than I, including anyone who rides a motorcycle, and wonder if King is on to something. Statistically speaking, more people should come to grief than actually do.
Trish’s father prefers the words “subaudible” and “insensate force” to “God.” It’s true that “God” brings unnecessary complications into the conversation. It certainly does in Justin’s case, who had attended four church services (!) in the 24 hours before he died, it being the weekend after Easter (April 30, 2000). His last words before drowning were “Jesus, God.” A wise Franciscan monk in Barcelona told me that young people Justin’s age are particularly spiritually attuned at his age (21) and that his spiritual questing had taken an unexpected turn.
I found the idea comforting because it led me to think that Justin was still searching in some form. I never for one moment thought of blaming God because, even though heaven is present “in a grain of sand” (William Blake), God isn’t a puppet master. I think of God rather as a primal force that delights in creation—it’s as though this force/God is endlessly discovering itself in beauty and complexity, including the complexity of evolution. By seeking to align ourselves with this force and becoming conscious of it, we discover further wonders, including works of art and scientific theories.
Put another way, we use the brain and the mind with which we’ve been gifted in amazing ways. Ultimately, however, creation is so much bigger than we are—than we can artistically imagine or scientifically understand—that we can’t hope to grasp why bad things happen to good people.
A powerful articulation of this is God’s response to Job. Instead of offering an individual explanation, God presents Job with the magnificence of creation, which overwhelms the lesser explanations (including the idea that Job somehow brought his suffering upon himself or that God is unfair). Although Job could remain buried in his sorrow, an alternative is to open himself to creation, which is what Julia and I tried to do as we emerged from grieving. Like Trisha’s father, we worked from the premise that “some kind of insensate force for the good” governs the universe. We sought ways to join our tiny efforts with that force, including reaching out to others (students especially) who were suffering.
In other words, I do not think the universe operates like the blind happenstance that Thomas Hardy refers to in his poem “Hap” (see my post on it here). Rather, I believe something closer to Dante’s closing line in The Divine Comedy: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (“the love that moves the sun and other stars”).
