How Are We to Understand Lingering Illness And Premature Death In
A Child?
2nd
Samuel 12:16-23
Mark 5:1-43
[1]
I’ve always found conducting the funerals of children
extraordinarily difficult. I
manage to get through the service, albeit shakily, and then I stagger
home and fall on my wife.
What is worse than the death of a child?
For years I said that the greatest burden I’ve seen in people
is the burden of childlessness. People
will do anything to have a
child. Yet if they can’t
have a child, can’t adopt a child, I’ve noticed that husband and
wife don’t thereafter divorce. But
when a child dies the parents divorce 70% of the time.
In other words, the death of a child strains marriages beyond the
breaking point more often than not.
Then perhaps there is something worse than childlessness; namely,
the death of a child. When
David’s child died (the child he had had with Bathsheba), his servants
were afraid to tell him lest the heartbroken king kill himself.
[2]
Everyone is upset at the death of a child.
Everyone feels the death of a child to be especially tragic.
We feel that the child has been cheated.
We don’t feel this way about the elderly.
When Maureen and I lived in rural
New Brunswick
we called one evening on Mr. and Mrs. Henry Palmer.
Henry Palmer was dying. He was 98 years old.
As he lay dying in the bedroom Mrs. Palmer sat in her rocking
chair, that winter evening, close to the fire in the wood stove, rocking
pensively, saying little. Maureen,
assuming Mrs. Palmer to be upset, began to commiserate with her.
Mrs. Palmer listened to Maureen for a while and then interjected,
without interrupting her rocking, “Henry’s had a good life.”
By our standards he’d had a difficult life: he’d had to spend
a month at backbreaking labour every year just to cut enough firewood
for the winter, among other things.
Still, by Mrs. Palmer’s standards, Henry had had a good life.
Where children are concerned, however, our standards or anybody
else’s standards mean nothing: we feel the child has scarcely had any
life.
[3]
Lingering illness in a child; untimely death in a child; these
are manifestations of evil. Evil
is evil, and must never thought to be anything else.
We must never pretend that evil is “good in disguise.”
“Good in disguise” is still good; evil can never be good.
We must never say that evil is good on the way, or at least the
potential for good. Of
itself evil is never the potential for anything except more evil.
My aunt’s grandson (my cousin’s son) died at age seven.
The little boy was born a normal child and developed normally
until age two when he was diagnosed with a neurological disease.
His condition deteriorated thereafter.
His facial appearance changed -- became grotesque, in fact; his
mobility decreased; and his intellectual capacity decreased.
When I spoke with my aunt at the funeral parlour I said to her,
“There’s no explanation for this.”
(I didn’t mean there was no neurological explanation; of course
there was a neurological explanation.)
I meant, rather, “Given what you and I know of
God, there’s no explanation for this.”
My aunt told me later it was the most comforting thing anyone had
said to her at the funeral parlour, for virtually everyone who spoke
with her put forth an “explanation”; such as, “Maybe God wanted to
teach the parents something.” What were the parents supposed to be
taught by watching their son suffer and stiffen and stupefy for five
years? “Maybe God was
sparing the little boy something worse later in his life.”
It would be difficult to imagine anything worse.
These aren’t explanations; these are insults.
As long as God is love, unimpeded love, there isn’t going to be
an explanation for this.
We must always be careful and think 25 times before we conclude
we’ve found the meaning (or even a
meaning) to such a development. Think
of the one and one-half million children who perished during the
holocaust. Their parents
(four and one-half million of them) were first gassed to death,
whereupon their remains were burnt.
The children, on the other hand, were never gassed; they were
thrown live into the
incinerators. If anyone
claims to be aware of the meaning of this event I shall say, among other
things, “Meaning for whom? for the barbequed children? for their
parents? for their survivors? for their executioners? for the shallow
pseudo-philosophers who think their question is worth the breath they
spend to utter it?” What
meaning could there ever be to such an event?
We can bring the same question to bear on any one child who is
dying at this moment in the Hospital for Sick Children.
[4]
In light of what I’ve just said I have to tell you how unhappy
I’ve been with Harold Kushner’s bestselling book, When
Bad Things Happen To Good People.
I’m disappointed in the book for several reasons.
In the first place there’s virtually no discussion of God’s
love in Kushner’s discussion of God.
In view of the fact that God is
love, that God’s nature is to love, the book is woefully deficient
right here. In the second
place, because God’s love isn’t discussed, the rest of the book is
skewed. Kushner writes,
“Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do
not have a meaning when they happen to us.
[I’ve no problem with this.]
They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to
accept them willingly. [No
problem here either.] We can
redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on
them.” I object to this
statement. We
redeem them by imposing
meaning on them? Any meaning
that is imposed can only be
arbitrary. An arbitrary
meaning, something imposed, is
just another form of “make-believe”, and no less “make-believe”
for being adult “make-believe.”
My cousin and his wife whose seven-year old son died of
neurological disease; what meaning were they supposed to impose
on the event? And why impose
that meaning rather than another?
And how would the imposition of such arbitrary meaning redeem the
tragedy?
Harold Kushner’s book is yet another attempt at theodicy.
Theodicy is the justification of God’s ways with humankind, the
justification of God’s ways in the face of human suffering.
All attempts at theodicy lefthandedly put God on trial, so to
speak, and then develop arguments that acquit God, allowing us to
believe in him after all, allowing us to believe that he really is kind
and good despite so much that appears to contradict this.
All theodicies assume that we know what should happen in the
world; as long as there continues to happen what shouldn’t, God (we
think) is on trial; we have to develop arguments and marshall evidence
that will acquit him if we are to go on believing in him.
[5]
All of which brings me to my next point; namely, our assumption
that the questions we think to
be obvious and obviously correct are the right questions.
The question, for instance, “If God is all-good, he must want
to rectify the dreadful state of affairs so often found in people’s
lives; if God is all-powerful, he must be able to rectify such a state
of affairs. Since such a
state seems not to be rectified, then either God isn’t all-good or he
isn’t all-powerful, is he?” Next
we set about trying to remove the suspicion that surrounds either
God’s goodness or his might. We
think our question to be the right question, even the only question.
But in fact the question we’ve just posed didn’t loom large
until the 18th century, specifically the 18th century Enlightenment.
The question we’ve just posed was raised by Enlightenment
thinkers who weren’t even Christians.
Eighteenth century Enlightenment atheists raised the question,
and Christians took it over in that they thought it to be a profound
question. But this question
didn’t loom large in the Middle Ages where physical suffering, at
least, was worse than it is today. This
question wasn’t pre-eminent in the ancient world; neither was it
front-and-centre in the biblical era.
The pre-eminent question in the biblical era wasn’t “Why?”,
because those people already knew why: the entire creation is molested
by the evil one. The
pre-eminent question in the biblical era was “How long?
How long before God terminates this state of affairs?
What’s taking him so long?”
Think for a minute of the biblical era; think of John the
Baptist. John and Jesus were
cousins. Not only were they
related by blood, they were related by vocation.
John began his public ministry ahead of Jesus.
John’s ministry ended abruptly when a wicked woman, angry at
his denunciation of her sexual irregularities, had him slain.
What did Jesus do when he learned of John’s death and the
circumstances of John’s death? Did
Jesus say, “We need a theodicy. We
need a justification of the ways of God.
We need an explanation of how John’s terrible death could occur
in a world ruled by a God whose love is mighty.
And if no explanation is forthcoming, then perhaps we can’t
believe in God.” -- did Jesus say this?
Jesus said no such thing. When
John’s head was severed Jesus didn’t cry to heaven, “You expect me
to trust you as my Father; but how can I believe you’re my Father, for
what Father allows his child to be beheaded?
In view of what happened to cousin John, I can’t be expected to
think that I’m dear to you.” Jesus
said no such thing. When he
was informed of the grisly death of John, Jesus said, “It’s time I
got to work.” Whereupon he
began his public ministry, and began it knowing that what had befallen
John would befall him too, and did it all with his trust in his Father
unimpaired.
My point is this: that question which we suppose to be a
perennial question, “How can we continue to believe in a mighty,
loving God when terrible things keep happening in our world?” --
wasn’t the most pressing question in the biblical era or the ancient
church or the mediaeval church. It
was shouted only in the 18th century Enlightenment, and was shouted by
atheists. Having heard the
atheists’ question, the church took it over thinking it to be the soul
of profundity.
Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles, had 19
children. Ten of them
survived. As the other nine
died (eight of them in infancy), Susannah’s heart broke.
Never think that she didn’t care; never think that her heart
wasn’t as torn as anyone’s heart would be torn today.
Read her diary the day after a domestic helper accidentally
smothered Susannah’s three-week old baby.
Infant death was as grievous to parents then as it is now.
What was different, however, is this: even as Susannah pleaded
with God for her babes while they died in her arms she never concluded
that God wasn’t to be trusted or loved or obeyed or simply clung to;
she never concluded that as a result of her heartbreak God could only be
denounced and abandoned.
Until the 18th century Enlightenment there was no expectation of
living in a world other than a world riddled with accident, misfortune,
sickness, disease, unrelievable suffering, untimely death.
There was no expectation of anything else.
It was recognized that the world, in its fallen state, is shot
through with unfairness, injustice, inevitable inequities, unforeseeable
tragedies. When John the
Baptist was executed Jesus didn’t say, “If honouring God’s will
entails that then I need a different Father.”
Instead Jesus said, “I’ve got work to do and I’d better get
started.” Susannah Wesley
didn’t say, “If I bear children only to have half of them succumb to
pneumonia and diphtheria, I should stop having them.”
Instead she had twice as many.
If today our expectation is so very different on account of the
Enlightenment, then what did the Enlightenment cause us to expect?
[6]
The Enlightenment brought us to expect that humankind can control, control entirely, the world and everything about it.
The Enlightenment brought us to expect that we are or can be in
control of every last aspect of our existence.
Specifically, the Enlightenment brought us to expect that the
practice of medicine would smooth out our lives.
And with the new expectation of physicians there arose as well a
new agenda for physicians. Whereas
physicians had always been expected to care for patients, now physicians
were expected to cure patients. Until
the Enlightenment physicians were expected to care: they were to
alleviate pain wherever they could, they were expected to ease the
patient in every way possible, and above all they were expected to ease
the patient through death, which death everyone knew to be unavoidable
in any case. But cure? No one expected
physicians to cure, at least to cure very much.
Nowadays physicians are expected to cure everything.
I’m convinced that people unconsciously
expect physicians to cure them of their mortality.
When physicians can’t cure people of their vulnerability to death,
blame for such failure is unconsciously transferred from medicine to
God.
A minute ago I said that we creatures of modernity assume
(arrogantly) that the questions we
ask are the questions that people have asked in every era; our questions
are perennial questions, and our answers are the only answers.
It’s not so. If
people today are asked how they’d prefer to die, they nearly always
say, “Quickly. I want to
die quickly. I’d like to
slip away quietly in my sleep.” During
the Middle Ages, however, no one wanted to die quickly; people dreaded
sudden death. Why?
Sudden death gave them insufficient time to make adequate
spiritual preparation for death. What
we regard as human expectations as old as humankind are actually very
recent. What’s more, these
recent expectations weren’t fostered as we reflected on the nature and
purpose and way of God; they were fostered by atheists who, at the time
of the Enlightenment, came to think that there was nothing humankind
couldn’t control.
[7]
Let’s come back to the situation of the young person afflicted
with a lingering illness and about to die all too young.
Why are we so very upset at this?
I think we’re upset in that we feel the young person to have
been cheated. The 85-year
old who dies has had a life, a complete life (or at least what we regard
as complete.) The eight-year
old, we feel, hasn’t; she’s been cheated.
The elderly person’s life can be told by means of a story; the
young person, on the other hand, has virtually no story to be told.
I am 63 years old, and if I die tonight others will gather up my
life in a story and tell the story.
Hearers will identify me, the real “me”, with my story.
But let’s be honest: they will regard “me” and my story as
identical in that my story is fit to be told; my story is positive; my
story is rich (supposedly.) No
one would hesitate to tell my story.
But if my story were one that couldn’t be told; if my story
were bleak or disgraceful or incomprehensible, others would like to
think that the real “me” was somehow better, somehow grander, than
my shabby story.
It isn’t only the eight-year old child with leukaemia whose
story seems to be sad and sorry and miserable.
There are many, many adults whose stories are longer, to be sure,
but no better. One Sunday,
several years ago, a man wearing a clerical collar sat in the gallery of
my church in
Mississauga
, accompanied by a lawyer-friend of mine.
The man with the collar was an Anglican clergyman.
He was also a plastic surgeon with a practice in one of the
wealthiest areas of
Toronto
. He was at worship, that
Sunday, as he awaited trial. He
and his estranged wife had had an altercation, in the course of which
his wife was struck, the result of which was that her skull was
fractured. Several weeks
after the service the attended in
Mississauga
the fellow was convicted and sent to jail.
Upon his release from jail the
College
of
Physicians
and Surgeons restored his licence, thus permitting him to do plastic
surgery again. The Anglican
Church, however, didn’t reinstate him as a clergyman.
A year later the man committed suicide.
What’s his story? Is
it a grand story? Is it a
story anyone would envy? Or
is it a story better left untold?
Maureen and I were asleep on a Friday evening when the
phone rang at
midnight
. The caller was a man
I’ve looked out for for 20 years.
He’s paranoid schizophrenic.
I’ve followed him around to restaurants, hospitals, jails, and
numerous shabby “digs.” Last
autumn he was in
Vancouver
and got into a “discussion” (as he
tells his story) with a motel clerk.
The clerk phoned the police, and Eric spent the next three months
in a provincial hospital. A
week or two before Christmas I took him to Swiss Chalet for lunch.
We had been seated for only a few seconds when he leapt out of
his seat and shouted, “It’s bugged.
It’s bugged. There’s
a tape-recorder under my seat.” I
took the shaken waitress aside, told her my friend was deranged,
promised her I’d see that no harm befell her, and asked her to find us
seats in an area that was free of tape-recorders.
A few months after
this incident Eric phoned me again.
In the afternoon he’d gone to a barber shop, only to have the
barber “butcher” his hair. And
why had the barber “butchered” his hair? Because the barber too is
part of the conspiracy that is putting foreign substances in Eric’s
drinking water and causing his urine to stink.
Eric had come home; his sister had burnt the supper-meal toast;
Eric had decompensated and smashed the toaster.
His sister had fled the house; the police had been called; Eric
had refused to open the door to them – and was now in a great deal
more trouble. Eric was
phoning me at midnight. He
wasn’t angry and he wasn’t violent: he was frightened, terribly
frightened. He feared he was
going to be sent back to a provincial hospital.
Eric is 65 years old. He
was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic when he was a 20-year old
university student. Eric has
suffered atrociously since then. He
hasn’t had one torment-free day in 45years.
What’s Eric’s story? Do
you want to hear all the details? Would
anyone want his story (all of it) told at his funeral?
Tell me: are Eric and Eric’s story identical?
The truth is, none of us is identical with our story.
Our story isn’t big enough, comprehensive enough, grand enough.
None of us has a story (whether tellable or untellable) that does
justice to who we are truly in
ourselves because of who we are truly
before God. Our story is
small and feeble and miserable and frustrated.
Often our story, so far from reflecting who we truly are,
contradicts who we truly are. Our
story has to be taken up into a much bigger story.
Then what’s the bigger story, grander story, for Eric?
It’s the story of a man who once lived in a cemetery. (Mark
5:1-20) He was violent,
anti-social, and an inveterate “streaker.”
One day Jesus came upon him and asked, “What’s your name?”
“My name?”, the fellow replied, “I’ve got lots of names.
I’m your local nut-case; so why not call me ‘Peanut,
Pistachio and Pecan’, ‘P-cubed’ for short.”
Some time later the townspeople saw the same man seated, clothed
and in his right mind. By
God’s grace that gospel-story has been appointed to be Eric’s story,
Eric’s true story.
That story is the final story into which Eric’s story is taken
up and in which Eric’s story is transfigured.
And the eight-year old who has just died of leukaemia?
Her story too is bigger, grander than most people know.
A distraught man cried to Jesus, “My daughter is sick unto
death. Won’t you come with
me?” Our Lord is delayed
by a needy woman who is distressed herself.
While he’s delayed, the daughter dies.
Now all the relatives are beside themselves.
Jesus declares, “The little girl isn’t dead; she’s
asleep.” The relatives
scorn him. Plainly she’s
dead; anyone can see she’s dead.
But you see, in the presence of Jesus Christ (only in the
presence of him who is himself resurrection and life, only in his
presence but assuredly in his presence) death is but sleep.
The girl is awakened shortly -- as the eight-year old has been
appointed to be awakened. This
is the story into which the leukaemia patient’s story is taken up and
in which it is transfigured.
[8]
If you ask me why such things as leukaemia and mental illness
happen I shall not attempt an answer.
When tragedy befell John the Baptist Jesus didn’t say, “I
can’t figure out why these things happen; therefore I can’t trust my
Father.” Jesus knew that
in a fallen world such things happen and will continue to happen until
God’s patience, finally exhausted, ends the era of the fall and with
it forecloses the day of grace. Jesus
didn’t explain John’s wretched death; Jesus responded to the news of his cousin’s death by launching his
public ministry.
Let me conclude by recalling Aaron, my cousin’s little boy who
was diagnosed with a neurological disease at age two and who declined
hideously for the next five years. Our
Lord offers no explanation. (What
help would an explanation provide?)
Our Lord, rather, whose risen life is grander even than his life
from
Bethlehem
to
Golgotha
; his risen life is that
larger, grander story in which Aaron’s story is transfigured.
Furthermore, our Lord is the occasion of a response: the response
of Aaron’s friends and relatives and neighbours and congregation.
The response we make to all such developments is an expression of
our caring. (Not an
expression of our curing; ultimately I can’t cure you, you can’t
cure me, and medical practice can’t cure any of us, ultimately.)
Such a response will be caring enough until that day when we see
our Lord face-to-face, the sight of whose face will transfigure our
face, for the sight of his face will be enough to wipe away every tear
from every eye.
Victor
Shepherd
May
2007
