Chaplain's Corner

The question comes in many forms, but it is the same question, a question that either proves to erode faith or strengthen faith. The question comes from 95 year olds and 30 year olds. It comes from people who are looking for something to believe in and it comes from people who have believed for years. The question is an ancient question and a primitive question. The question is often the first question a child asks and it remains a question throughout life. One’s level of education is irrelevant, the cultural background, language and religion are irrelevant for the question is a human question, a spiritual question. The question is “Why?”

Sometimes there is an answer for the “Why” question. “Mommy, why do I have to wash my hands before I eat?” or “Why do I have to go to bed at 7:30?” or “Why does Daddy fall asleep in his chair after supper?” A mother can easily explain these matters to a two year old. Two year olds are easily satisfied with the answer but the answer is not difficult.

Sometimes there is an answer but the questioner is not capable of understanding the answer. When a five year old asks, “Why the sky is blue?” there is a scientific explanation but most five year olds would not understand the scientific principle of how light behaves to grasp the answer.

And sometimes no one has an answer. Or the answer is philosophical in nature and in matters of philosophy one must wrestle with the kind of questions that require faith and down through the millennia of human experience; there has been considerable contribution to these philosophical matters but always a myriad of conclusions and never any consensus. The reason for this is that philosophy is basically the pursuit of the answer to many “Why?” questions.

I’m not a trained philosopher, but training or not, we are do philosophy every day, we all develop a means by which we make sense out of our lives and what happens to us and around us. This activity that we engage, the “making sense of things” activity is practical philosophy. We early on in life realize that the “reasons” we come up with to explain things are often different than others. We some times amend our conclusions, we sometimes abandon conclusions for different ones and at times we become deeply committed to our conclusions often in the face of challenges to the conclusions we have reached.

Most of the time we have far too little information to go on in order to reach these conclusions. Philosophy is after all not a science in the real sense of the word. Philosophy is speculative. It requires faith. Faith requires that we settle (become wholeheartedly convinced) on presuppositions that can not be proven in a scientific sense and build from there. These unprovable presuppositions provide the beginning point for our coming to conclusions on how to make sense of the many “Whys” of life.

One example of this that I deal with all the time is the question “Why?” as it relates to sickness, tragedy, death. The question is often directed towards God and satisfactory answers are hard to come by. But people come up with answers.

One patient that I cared for dealt with the question “Why me?” with another question “Why not me?” As we explored this response the person explained, “Who do I think I am that I should be spared the difficulties of this life? Do I think I am better than others? Do I think that I deserve special treatment? Do I think that somehow I am more worthy of good health than the next person? NO! I am eligible for all the woes that any other human being is and that is that.

Another patient wrestled with the same question but had a very different response. “Why me?” “Well that is simple, it is God’s will. It is God’s will that I have cancer, that I suffer, that I die. I can’t say that I understand God’s purposes, but I trust Him and am going to allow my faith to grow in the face of this trouble.” Some scoff at this answer, but it is not uncommon among people of faith and I have personally seen this conclusion enable people to endure some pretty horrendous experiences with a deep sense of peace.

Another patient with the same question entered a protracted period of self-examination. The line of thought was, “I must have done something to deserve what I am experiencing. After all, you reap what you sow.” This response comes at times from people of widely divergent faith traditions: from Charismatic Christian to traditional Chinese religions to people with little or no religious foundation.

Another patient I once encounters responded to the question “Why?” with “God brought this into my life to prepare me for something he wants me to do. If I yield to God in this experience, I will learn lessons that will enable me to serve others in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to previously.” Many retrospective testimonials look back on past suffering and connect it with some current service opportunity and conclude: this present opportunity to serve is why I experienced that past suffering. This might be true of a woman who aborted a child and later concluded she was wrong in doing so and then dedicates her life to working in a Crisis Pregnancy Center striving to help other women make “better choices”.

Some of you are thinking, “OK Larry, you are dancing around this issue and not showing your own cards.” You are correct. I am dancing around this question, the “Why?” question because I don’t think there is one answer to it. I don’t believe we can ever be certain as to why something happens. I believe (yes it is a belief that I am willing to bet my life on) that God loves me, that he is committed to my good, that he never losses control of anything and that I will rarely if ever be able to understand the details so I simply trust God. When it comes to the whys of my life, I just trust that God is in control, that he loves me and is working for my good and that if I yield to this and stop resisting, that I will have peace.

I’m not saying that speculative philosophical work is of little profit. Heavens, I have engaged untold hours in trying to figure out things and trying to make sense of things and in the end I have come to the conclusions that my capacity is so limited that the best I can claim is that “This is the way I make sense of what happened.” But even having done that, my default has become: I believe with all my heart that God loves me, that he has my best interest in his heart and that he is accomplishing that purpose through all the happenings of my life.

This is how I make sense of my life. This is how I deal with the “Why?” question. I know some will believe that I must be quite a simple fellow to embrace such a conclusion. I’m OK with that. I also know that each one of us must do this work, come to conclusions about the “whys of life” and we can’t borrow another’s conclusions. So, as you wrestle with the “WHY?” question it is my hope that somewhere and somehow your conclusion will rest in the wondrous mystery of God’s loving kindness.