In Which I Get Annoyingly Philosophical

"Everything happens for a reason."

I've heard this line a couple of times, as people search for something they can say that will bring me comfort in the midst of my sorrow.  I know it's hard to know what to say.  I can tell you that falling back on "Everything happens for a reason" is a big fat fail.

To be honest, I find it incredibly shocking that so many people seem to subscribe to this idea.  I wonder if they've done a Pew survey of how many Americans would say they agree with this statement--I suspect the vast majority.  In fact, I guess I shouldn't be so surprised, because before Eliza died, I was one of those people who probably would have agreed with this statement (or at least said it out loud as though I believed it) without really thinking about what it means.

Now I wonder, do the people espousing this point of view actually grasp the extensive implications of that philosophy?  I mean, I totally get the desire to organize life experiences according to a narrative that makes logical sense even if we can't understand it at the moment.  I would LOVE to believe that things happen for a reason! To think that there is some clear organization to this world, that seeing it is just outside the realm of human ability.  But someday, (I dunno, I guess like judgment day, or maybe the day after judgment day) God will just take me aside and say, "I know it really sucked that Eliza had to die, but you'll understand once I tell you the really good reason I had for arranging things this way."

I just don't believe it's going to shake out that way.  And I cannot even begin to fathom the sort of reason that even God could offer me that I would find to be a remotely acceptable excuse for her death.  She was not a sacrificial lamb, she is not a guardian angel.  She's just my baby.  And there is no reason for her not to be here with the people who love her except there was a terrible, random accident and now we're all sad about that.

It's easy to explain a near-miss, a close-shave, a narrowly-avoided accident, a remarkable survival, by attributing it to the hand of fate/God.  God must have been watching over that guy who walked away from a terrible car accident.  We hear that sort of thing all the time.

But does that mean that God just got careless or busy and that's why another car accident took out an entire family?  Or that the lack of divine intervention means that it was part of his plan for innocent people to be cut down in the prime of their lives?  Was there a "reason" for that?  It was their time?

The fact is, we devise methods to intervene and save lives all the time.  That's not thwarting a master plan.  That's being reasonable and responsible and pro-active.  Why would anyone want to believe that we are passive creatures, pawns of fate?  And yet I hear this line of thinking all the time.

It's also easy to believe that things happen for a reason when everything in your life has worked out well so far.  Before Eliza died, I was a pretty lucky girl.  Sure I had lots of angst, but my life was pretty sweet.  I might have even said I was "blessed."  I used to like to think that there was a REASON David ended up in Nevada, and a reason I was assigned to substitute at the elementary school where he worked.  I used to think there was a REASON that I was assigned to the third floor of Banks Hall my freshman year of college, where I met some of my very best friends.  It was easy to believe that the people in my life came into it for REASON.  I was supposed to move to St. Louis, meet this friend, take this job, get introduced to these people. It was all part of a greater plan.

But, no.  Good things happened to me because I was lucky.  (Until I wasn't.)  There's no plan.  The point of it all is to make the most of what you're given.  There's no reason you're luckier than someone else.  It's just how things have shaken out so far.

You see, if I believed that those good things happened for a reason, then I'd also have to believe that there is a reason that toddlers get cancer.  I'd have to say that there's some reason that a tornado would rip a child literally out of his father's arms.  There's a reason that an entire airplane full of innocent people was flown into an office building.  There must be a reason that a drunk driver plowed into a young father on his way home from work.  There's a reason that an electrical fire took the lives of two little girls.  There's a reason that Alzheimer's has made a stranger out of a beloved grandmother.

And what could that reason be?  How could anything POSSIBLY justify those tragedies?  What kind of reasonable explanation could I ever be offered that would satisfactorily explain why my baby died?

(In case you're struggling with the rhetorical questions, let me help you out with the correct answer:  There could never be a good enough reason.)

There are two distinct ideas connected to the thought that everything happens for a reason.  The first is that there is a lesson to be learned here.  Those affected by a tragedy are expected to emerge on the other side, better, wiser, more appreciative, something like that.  If your experience makes you bitter, angry, or chronically depressed, then we don't say there's a good reason for that.  We quietly think that perhaps you have not sufficiently learned your lesson. It's a medieval point of view, but we cling to it.

The second implication is the idea that life is divinely ordained and its events are entirely out of our hands.  I do not subscribe to this notion.  These are stories we tell ourselves when we're safely outside trauma and loss, or when we're trying desperately to make sense of it and random chaos is too frightening to consider.  It would be nice to feel like our lives have a clear purpose and we can sit back and wait for that plan to unfold.  Not to worry!  God is in control of everything, that it will all work out in the end!  Comforting, perhaps.  But this outlook prevents us from having to take responsibility for our failures.  It also suggests that God parents through cruelty--like abusing kids who don't want to eat their vegetables.  It sidesteps the fact that the meaning of life is what we make of it, and ignores the most essential aspect of free will, which is that God doesn't control what happens to us.

I believe that the reason we seek spiritual and human connections is because we need strength to face the random chaos of our reality--the reality that terrible things happen for no reason, and there's nothing we can do about it except to seek the grace to get through it and try to help each other.  I do not think this idea is in any way incompatible with a Christian philosophy (although I realize it's also not so far removed from the Zen Buddhist notion that life is suffering and our purpose is to help to each other through).

I believe that we make our own meaning out of any event in our lives.  Substitute teaching at an elementary school became meaningful because I met my husband there.  And we decided to stay married.  We gave that encounter meaning; it didn't have it on its own.  We're struggling to give Eliza's death meaning, to honor her by appreciating life on a day to day basis, by finding love wherever we can.

But we have to fight to make her loss meaningful.  There's no greater lesson to be learned from it.  This is not a teaching moment.  It's just a tragedy.  Life just sucks sometimes.

So I don't believe that everything happens for a reason. And I know you can't argue someone else out of their "truth," but I really don't want to have to listen to it, either.

That said, I do think there are lots of good reasons to make the most meaning you can out of every day, even when it's a struggle.  I'm still seeking pockets of happiness and trying to exist in those moments.

Here are a few of my favorites:

the sweetest pup

the unpredictable one

the hubs

it made me cry, but i loved it.

summer reading

all things grapefruit--including soda!