In my spiritual care ministry with palliative care clients, I often run into the why question. As one sixty-five year old wife and mother complained to me again this month, “why do I have to die from cancer? There is so much that I want to still enjoy…with my husband, children, and grandchildren?” The answer to these types of why questions is one I have wrestled with a lot beginning 30 years ago when my first brother Jamie died from HIV/AIDS in 1992. In this blog, I want to share how I currently process the why question. Examples of the Why Question This week in church I again heard a common way this Why question is asked. The preacher was talking about the tragic story that is often skipped over when celebrating Epiphany. On this particular Sunday, the preacher focused on the very end of the Wisemen story where all the baby boys under the age of 2 were killed by King Herod because he was trying to kill the baby Jesus, a baby who he saw as a threat to his throne. The preacher asked the why question in this way: Why did God warned Joseph, the father of Jesus, to flee Bethlehem to save his young son but not the other parents whose sons ended being murdered in this killing spree? Why? If this Wise Men story is historical, scholars estimate 20 baby boys were slaughtered in Bethlehem. I had similar questions around my brothers’ death in 1992 and 1997. After all the medical advances in treating hemophilia, why would God allow my brothers to die at the prime of their lives? And why did my two brothers become hemophiliacs through getting the bad X chromosome from my mother while I got the good X chromosome and so was hemophilia-free. Why was I hemophilia-free and my brothers were not and thus got HIV/AIDS? And why did my God not heal my brothers of their HIV/AIDS? They were good people. They had done nothing that sinful that demanded the punishment of death as a consequence. I remember preaching a sermon at First Mennonite Church in Kitchener in 1992 where I expressed my anger at God for what was happening to my brother Jamie. A month later he died. I remember a 65 year man who I visited many times two years ago and in the end did his funeral. The why question was very alive for him. He had asked this emotional question many times in this life. When this man was in his late teens, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease, a type of cancer. That was the beginning of his journey with the Why question. At the time, he was a student at University of Toronto, very athletic, and a member of the University football team. He had a full life before him...and then cancer. They treated it in those days through massive radiation of the chest area where many lymph nodes are. He was able to beat the cancer. But then 15 years later in his mid 30’s, his pancreas failed and he became a severe diabetic needing to take insulin for the rest of life. Doctors concluded that his failed pancreas was due to the severe radiation he received when he was young. Why God? Then at the age of 40, he had a serious heart attack due to his heart being damaged by that earlier radiation. Why God? In his early 50’s, he again had heart issues, and a damaged heart valve needed to be replaced. Then he started losing his voice due to vocal chords that were damaged by the radiation. And then over 2 years before he died, he learned that he had cancer again...lung cancer that had spread, and this time, he knew he could not beat it. Why God, why me? We spent many visits processing this question. Asking the Why Question is a Sign of a Strong Faith As I visit people who are asking the why question, I want them to realize that this is a good question. The question is not, as some people of faith suggest, a sign of having a weak faith. That is far from the truth. In fact, I think asking this question is a sign of the very opposite…a sign of a very strong faith, a sign that one does care about their faith and their relationship with God, so much so that they are willing to confront God with their why questions. Is this not what we see happening when Jesus asked the why question as he suffered on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The psalmist elegantly expresses the why question in this way, “When shall I come and behold the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’”(Ps 42: 3). Biblical Understandings of the Why Question Within the Bible, we see many stories of religious people connecting illness of people to the sinful behaviors in the person’s life. But we also see this direct connection between sin and suffering also challenged. One such example is the story of Job. Job is portrayed as a good and prosperous family man who suddenly experiences many horrendous disasters that take away all that he treasures: his family and his agricultural business. Job is convinced that he has done nothing to deserve this suffering but three of his friends come visit and they all articulate the common understanding of that time that he has done something wrong to deserve these sufferings. In the end of the story, God does come but God never answers Job’s why question. God simply states that it is beyond human comprehension. Within New Testament, we see a similar tension around the connection between human sin and suffering. In Jesus’ time, if a person became sick, they were immediately considered religiously unclean and needed to be separated from the community, which makes sense from a modern day public health perspective. Once the sickness was healed, the person went through a healing ritual that re-connected them back into the community. This healing ritual is evident in the New Testament when Jesus instructs a healed man to go to the priest and offer an offering required by Jewish Law (Matt. 8:1-4). This ritual would restore his purity status within his community. However, if this sickness didn’t disappear, these people were forever judged and condemned as unclean and sinful for the culture believed they were no longer part of God's holy people. We read stories in the New Testament where uncleaned people found themselves at the healing pools of Bethesda (John 5) and Siloam (John 9) hoping that someday they would be healed by God and thus regain their purity status and become part of their family and God’s community again. Both sickness and healing had significant physical and social implications in Biblical times. We also read in the New Testament how Jesus challenged the belief that sickness is a sign of God’s judgement on sin. The most well-known case is the story of a man born blind from birth. His disciples asked Jesus about this blind man, “Who sinned in this case, his parents or the blind man?” Jesus answered, “Neither. He was born blind so that God’s works could be revealed in him” (John 9). This belief that God’s work is revealed in the healing of people’s suffering has become a major tenet of my palliative care ministry. The answer to the why question is never God’s punishing people for their sinful choices. Rather, suffering is an opportunity for God’s healing presence to be revealed. There are many Bible verses that promote this positive relationship between God and sickness. So how do we make sense of this relationship between sickness and sin and the why question tied to God’s will? Suffering: The Gift Nobody Wants As I processed this why question 25 years ago, the book “Pain, The Gift Nobody Wants” was a key book that help me find my way out of the wilderness created by the why question. In this book, Dr. Brand and Philip Yancey use the disease leprosy as a framework to make sense of the purpose behind suffering. The disease leprosy is caused by a bacteria the kills the nerves that come from the external parts of our body like eyes, hands, and feet. With these nerves dead, a person with leprosy is no longer able to feel pain. If the nerves in a person’s eyes are affected, their eyes will stop blinking, no longer able to feel an irritant in their eyes. Soon, these unprotected eyes would become blind. When the nerves in the hands and feet stop sending pain messages to the brain, you would not know if you have walked on a thorn or have injured these parts of your body. Over time, the tissues in these areas break down due to infections leading to deformed hands and feet. Dr. Brand concludes that physical pain is a gift to the human body, information that our body and we use to keep our physical selves healthy. Following the same logic, the authors argue that suffering is soul pain, a sign that our soul needs attention so that spiritual healing can happen. When we disregard these signs of suffering, our soul has to take on coping patterns like numbing, avoidance, comfort activities (overeating, drinking, medication, etc), trauma survival strategies (fight, flight, freeze, collapse), control behaviors, etc. These coping patterns help us survive in the short term but they are not meant to heal our soul pain. In the long run, these coping patterns will eventually cause our soul and body to physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually break down and deform, and we begin to really struggle with long term or chronic health conditions. Suffering is a Sign that our Soul is Struggling Seen in this way, we see a new way to understand the why of suffering. We no longer see suffering as caused by God. Rather, suffering, like pain, is a sign that something is wrong causing our soul to struggle experiencing a vibrant life. It is here that I find the Theory of Holes, as taught by the Diamond Approach, a helpful way to understand the various forms of suffering within the human soul. The Diamond Approach teaches that all humans are born with complete healthy souls that are in a state of oneness with reality, life, and God. All the various aspects of Spirit naturally arise within us, as a child, when we are held well by our parents, life, and God. As a result, the dynamics of compassion, love, grace, truth, strength/courage, value, trust, joy, power to be oneself, resilience, etc. all manifest freely within our experience as we encounter different aspects of life. However, we were not held well all the time by our holding environment like the woman I saw recently. Her mother had many rules that made her life very scary. She, as a little girl, learned quickly to not cry for her mother would say to her when she cried, “stop your crying or I will give you something to cry about.” This caused her to develop a hole in her psyche around compassion and now, in her adult years, when compassion would naturally emerge, she quickly moves to judgement, self judgement and judgement of others. She also discovered asking questions was dangerous and so she soon learned to shut down her natural child-like curiosity. As a result, she stopped asking questions and listening to her curiosity and truth creating another hole in her soul. Instead, she learned to live with the anxiety that arose from this hole of not knowing, an anxiety that arises now every time she enters the unknown which happens a lot for she still fears asking questions. While she often felt angry toward her mother, she would never dare show it and so she learned to smother her anger causing her now to struggle with a hole around anger, namely the experience of weakness. Any sense of anger or perceived anger or intensity from others now scares her as an adult because of this hole. And thanks to this constant fear of her mother, she found herself, as a little girl, constantly walking on egg shells and thus she lost touch with a basic trust toward others, self, life, and God. She now sees all life as potentially very dangerous. With all of these psychic holes and coping patterns, you can perceived how her soul became deformed causing her to experience many mental health and physical health challenges. She struggles, as do all of us to some extent, with the impact of spiritual leprosy that she experienced as a child. The Theory of Holes applies this same pattern to all the different aspects of Spirit. As each spiritual dynamic is blocked or distorted, it leads to a distinct expression of soul pain. If this suffering is not addressed, a deforming process will happen to our soul, similar to what happens to our physical body when pain is ignored, leading to sporadic or chronic forms of suffering. The gift of suffering is that it points to the areas were healing needs to happen. This is the why of suffering. Death: Another Gift Nobody Wants But the why question is not just about the reality of suffering. The why question must also address the reality of death for one of the biggest causes of suffering in life is the reality of death. The medical profession, along with most people, see death as an enemy that we hopefully one day will destroy. This thinking is also in the Christian Church for death is often seen as an expression of our fallen world. After many years of wrestling with this question, I have come to a very different place around the reality of death. In fact, I hope we never find the cure to physical death. Seeing how human suffering is a gift, I began to wonder if death could be a similar gift. What would we lose if someone waved a magic wand and death disappeared? Death Brings Meaning to Relationships and Life If death were to disappear, I wondered how our relationship to our children would change…now that there would be no need to physically protect them since there would no risk of them dying. As it is now, parents are challenged to meet the many psychological and physical needs of their children due to the competing demands of work, family life, financial needs, friendships, and self-care needs. If death was no longer a reality, would we care for them in the same way? There is something about the physical vulnerability of our children that deepens our concern and love for our children. I think of marital and significant love relationships, in fact, all our close friends and family. Would we treasure each of them in the same way if we knew they would live forever or does the reality of death cause us to cherish them and not take them for granted. I see in my palliative care ministry many significant moments of sharing love happen as a loved one approaches death. In other words, the reality of death deepens our love for loved ones. Without the reality of death, I wonder how deep our love relationships would be. And what about purpose in life? Does not the shortness of life not only cause our relationships to change but also make life far more meaningful for us? We often only have 40 or 50 years to do productive work, to make a difference in this world, to leave some sort of legacy. If we knew we would live forever, would we cherish work? Would we seek to make this world a better place or would we echo the words of Ecclesiastes in the Bible who concluded that life is meaningless so we should just go out and enjoy life? Death is the Doorway to the Release of Suffering There is something else that is lost if death disappeared. Often, when we imagine death disappearing, we also imagine that there would be no suffering in this world without death. But would that be true? I am very suspicion that the opposite would be the case, that our human world would struggle more with injustice, greed, hate, war, oppression, racism, disease, earthquakes, climate change, etc. Since nothing could kill us now, we would live forever in our fallen world that would be full of suffering. In fact, the realities of this suffering may even become worst in this eternal world. We would soon discover in this eternal world that our planet Earth is a close system with a limited number of resources. With births continuing and deaths stopping, we would soon realize that we need a moratorium on childbirth for our world's population would balloon to a place where we could not produce enough food for everyone. We would have more starving people then we have now, more issues around food and wealth distribution, more expressions of injustices, more "us and them" divisions, more suffering than we do now. Furthermore, in this world of eternal life, I can easily imagine that there would be many suffering people begging for the existence of death. For people who are on the palliative journey, there is a natural transition that eventually happens when people begin to see death as their friend and no longer their enemy. This happens as life in this earthly world becomes less joyful and meaningful. Physical death becomes a friend, a gift from God. This is probably why the future vision of a new Heaven and New Earth within the Christian tradition involves a world where there is no longer death and No More Suffering, “nor mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev 21:1-4). Until this future time, death is a friend from God that allows us to leave this world of earthly suffering to a new afterlife world free of suffering where life is eternal. God is not the Cause of Suffering But the Healing Agent of Suffering Throughout this blog, I have purposely worked at separating out God from the cause of suffering. This belief has not always been true for me. Through my upbringing in the church and pastoral education, I, at one time, believed that God was both the cause of our suffering, that is, suffering was the consequence of sin and disobeying God, and the healing agent of this suffering. I have come to realize that such a schizophrenic view of God who both punishes and heals does not truly believe that God is an unconditional lover whose love is everlasting and eternal. Instead, this view believes that God loves us and heals us when we are obedient and causes us to suffer when we are sinful. It also didn't help that I, like most Christians, was taught in the church that God is all powerful, that God can do anything God wants in this earthly world. If this is true, then it follows logically that such a powerful God could heal anyone of their diseases, like my brothers with HIV/AIDS. So why was God not healing my brothers? Why has and is God not answering the millions of prayers asking for God to heal them? Yes, we occasionally learn of divine healings here and there, but these rare healings only amplify the why question: Why them and not all the others? What makes them so special in God's eyes? Did they have more faith? This Christian teaching that God is all powerful really set us up to doubt and lose our faith in God. This notion that God is all powerful, when understood in this way, also challenges the belief that God is an unconditional lover, that God loves all the time and that God loves all people equally, no favourites. Let me propose a way out of this theological mess. What I now believe is that God loves us and wants to heal us all the time from now to eternally. There is no time or condition when this agape love and healing spirit is absent within our physical and human world. This love is always flowing from God within our physical reality like the sun is always shining on our Earth. However, we are born into physical bodies, human families, human cultures and civilizations, and a very earthly physical world. The physical laws of our earthly world restrict how completely the power and all the other qualities of God's spirit can incarnate into our human reality. How much God’s spirit can express itself within a child’s soul and body is quite limited due to physical, emotional, and mental developmental reasons compared to an adult's soul and body. We also know that our child's holding environment shapes in profound ways how our soul is structured, and as I have already highlighted in this blog, these psychic structures interfere, limit, and distort how we experience God's spirit in our soul, body, and life. This is why a child’s holding environment is so important to a person's spiritual development. God’s spirit can shape far more the soul of a healthy family system then a dysfunctional one. How healthy a culture and civilization is functioning determines how well God’s spirit can influence its communal soul to reflect the character of God. It is important to realize that God’s spirit is continuously trying to heal our world through manifesting within our world and us. This is the unconditional nature of God’s spirit of love. However, due to the limits of our physical bodies and souls, families, cultures, nations and civilization, and earthly world, the spirit of God cannot manifest in all of its fullness in all aspects of our life and world. Due to these limitations, we only experience certain aspects of God’s spirit in true complete ways in certain places and times. The remaining dynamics of God’s spirit we experience in limited ways causing some discomfort, sometimes in distorted ways creating some suffering, and if God’s spirit is fully blocked, we experience a lot of painful suffering. In seeing the why of suffering in this way, we see that God is not the source of our suffering. The why of our suffering is due to the limitations and brokenness found within our bodies, souls, families, cultures, civilizations and physical world. Rather, God is the healing agent within every aspect of life including our individual human souls and bodies. This means the goal of anyone involved in spiritual healing is helping people, families, cultures and civilizations bring their sufferings into the Present Moment where God’s Spirit can be experienced. It is here that we will discover the truth of what Jesus said about the blind man. He was not blind because of his sin or his parents’ sin. He was blind so that God’s works could be revealed in him (John 9). This is the ultimate answer to the why question around suffering.
Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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