EVIL & EVOLUTION

Epilogue

From Denial To Acceptance: A Personal Reflection

Over the years, it has struck me more and more how people not only manage to survive, but even prosper, in spite of the most perilous circumstances. Listening to survivors of war experiences or reading the stories of those who have lived through great disasters, or talking to those who have undergone many months or even years of seemingly fruitless medical treatment, one question continually comes back to me: had they only known what was in store for them, would they (or would I) have had the courage to go on? The answer that I'm continually tempted to arrive at is: no, the reason that they managed to live through the experience was that they didn't even realize at the time that they were in such danger or that their odds of survival were so poor.

Of course, this may be a rather cynical view, gratuitously given by one who has never had to endure such hardship or uncertainty. Perhaps I have failed to reckon with the fears they may have had before the event ever happened, fears which may have been harder to conquer than was the experience itself. Similarly, I have left faith too much out of the picture, a faith that may have been all the greater for the fear it had to contend with. My tendency to overlook these other factors may indicate a hidden preference for not anticipating things, a covert belief that the blissfully ignorant are in some way better off than those who realism may be overwrought.

If so, why attempt to write such a book as this? Would it not be better to simply leave people alone and not ask them to think about such things, lest in anticipating too much they fear and lose heart? Or, if people suddenly find themselves in the midst of some catastrophe, would it not be better to let them muster whatever faith they have and cope with the situation on that basis, no matter how poorly thought out or even distorted that faith may be? After all, if one way or another, they actually do survive, why quibble?
Is not survival the whole point of evolution in the end?

Perhaps so, but I'm not entirely convinced of that. It seems there is something more, something more significant that would argue for the superiority of humans over houseflies, some consciousness and freedom that makes a few years of intelligent awareness infinitely more valuable than aeons of unconscious tenacity.

In any case, after this comprehensive sweep of the whole matter of evil and its existence in God's universe, it is questions like these that bring me back full circle to the place we first started, our insistence on the problematic quality of evil in the face of divine mystery. Certainly, the distinction invites reconsideration, especially when one is forced to admit the difference between thoughts about living and the living of life.

Marcel's rather loose distinction between problem as amenable to intellectual solution and mystery as demanding lived participation was invoked. Yet almost immediately Marcel's insistence on evil as mystery was rejected, at least on the basis of his contention that "all explanations fail." I do not admit that they do, at least as far as they go. Quite the contrary, I think I have made a comprehensible case as to why there is and must be evil in the universe, a great deal of which is experienced as unfair. Likewise, I think I have shown that there is a very logical coherence in the connection between this interplay of chance and the accidents it brings in its wake and the kind of universe God seems to have intended when wishing to share creation with beings who would partake in divine freedom and love. If there is any mystery here, beyond the strictly theological sense of a truth that cannot nor ever will be penetrated completely by human reason, it must be in this creative expression of God's own nature as it is found in humans themselves.

Yet, as soon as we begin to talk about such an expression of God's design in human life, we have to admit with Marcel, at least to some degree, that there is something mysterious about human life and the part that evil plays in it. In this sense the problems posed by the existence of evil have to be more than abstractly analyzed, they have to be lived through and contended with as part of the even more positively mysterious process of human life.

It is at this point, however, that the beginning of this book and the observation made at the beginning of this postscript coincide, or maybe, collide. If people seem to survive better on the basis of not realizing or fully understanding what they are going through, would this not prove that at least the problem of evil be left to the speculations of intellectuals and that most people are better off when left in a "mysterious" state of confusion? Might they not, in knowing the whole state of affairs, especially the mystery of a God who may in some way suffer with us, loose their trusting faith altogether?

Again, I must disagree. The reason for this disagreement is not some conviction of the intellectual superiority of my position. It is based on my own appreciation of the truth that is experienced as part of the process of living. In the twenty some years since I began in pastoral work, as well as in the more recent years when study and teaching brought the opportunities for both friendships intermixed with pastoral concerns that were often much more sustained than most of those I experienced in parish work, I have learned a great deal. More vital still, however, has been my own life experience in the three years between the inception of the actual writing of this book and its completion -- the death of both of my parents, the death, after a long battle with cancer, of the aunt to whom I dedicated this book, and the deaths of others too numerous to name here.

Nor was it even the experience of living with the dying. There were the survivors to deal with: my father who agonized over my mother's long paralysis; my cousins and uncle who were daily faced with the task of groping for the proper words and, after their loss, with the apparent senselessness of it all. Finally, there was myself. Perhaps it was the hardest for me, for in their assumption that I somehow had all the answers, or that I should be expected to have them, there also was the camouflaging of my need to understand my own suffering. It almost seems that thought was out of touch with life; that the shoemaker himself was barefoot and, what's worse, didn't even realize it!

Most of all, it has been in the process of sharing a close friend's loss that I began to understand my own. In so doing I also began to experience in a much more personal way the stages described by Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her studies of dying patients. What I had observed in people who actually faced certain death and sensed as well in the living who had to repeat the process in themselves as survivors, I now felt most fully in myself the denial, the bargaining, the anger, and finally, but never totally, the acceptance.

"Time heals." So I was told (as I had so often told others). And yet, I know that is not entirely true. Perhaps the keenness of the reactions dull in time, yet the pain isstill there. Time in itself accomplishes very little except forgetfullness and very often does an imperfect job at that. Bargaining usually must give way to anger when there is no longer any possible deal to be won. But open anger is just as often replaced by depression rather than acceptance, and I have frequently seen where lifelong denial seems to have been the only way out. In such cases deliberate oblivion replaces any catharsis time may have allowed. When such a"solution" has been achieved, we must persist in asking: "at what price?"

Could it be that the acceptance wrought by time is only apparent, not unlike (in fact often accompanied by) anger that has been repressed and turned within? If so, I would in both instances judge that the last state may be no better than the first. The denial of the full reality of the tragic in our lives amounts to an attempt to live in a blissful ignorance that would avoid the hard questions of theodicy. To passively wish for time to cure all ills is not too different from a wish to lobotomize our memories or at least to rewrite our personal history in the fashion that has so appealed to families, institutions, and nations who would prefer, if they could, to forget the past. As individuals we are nevertheless part of these structures, and so we reproduce their reactions to evil.

Kübler-Ross's stages of dying or confronting loss seem particularly fruitful here. If the old evolutionary law of "recapitulation" -- of ontogeny imitating phylogeny -- is applicable in a psychological and sociological sense, the reverse is probably even more true. Whole societies, as Ernest Becker eloquently pointed out, engage in a systematic denial of death. Whole industries are built upon it. Some would single out the typical American funeral home as a prime example, although Dr. Kübler-Ross thinks that the medical profession as a whole is even less able to cope with death. If denial is so widespread, then there should be no surprise that bargaining plays the next most prevalent role. Here is where the medical care industry surely plays the lead, transforming the denial of death into a less preposterous but nevertheless often just as futile attempt to ward off the inevitable with prospects of "cures" or "remissions" of often very dubious quality.

Yet I would be very much less than honest to point my finger at these professions while ignoring my own. When it comes to denial and bargaining, the martyred theologian Bonhöffer most cannily summed up the situation when he accused Christianity of having turned itself into just another religion -- religion in the sense of an emotional and ritualized escape-hatch from reality. In so doing Christianity has vitiated the central meaning of the Incarnation as well as its central symbol, the Cross. It is only in dying to ourselves (which includes facing the whole truth) that we will live. It has been this challenge of Bonhöffer's "worldly Christianity" that has rightly been identified by the conservative reaction as the cause of much of the upset in the Church today. Theologically speaking, much of the New Theology that led to Vatican II, dominated it, and keep its effects alive has been of this tone. To the extent we can talk of theology as psychologically motivated, there has been a new determination to purge religion, or at least the Christian religion, of its regression to the functions of denial and bargaining. We can hardly be surprised at the bitter reaction to this movement, for anger forms the next step in the normal course of things.

Unlike denial and bargaining, phases which may be very brief or even absent entirely in more mature personalities, I have found that anger is almost bound to be present in one form or another, even though it may be very much disguised. This is partly because the targets of the anger also can vary a great deal, ranging all the way from God to oneself. Very often, however, the anger may be directed toward the deceased (for having abandoned the living) or may be projected on an innocent third party. In any case, I believe that some expression of anger is entirely normal and to be expected. Perhaps it should be even encouraged in some way lest reversion to a less realistic state, as perpetual denial, occur. In this regard, however, some interesting dimensions of faith (or its lack) are revealed.

If denial and bargaining seem to be the weaknesses of misunderstood and misused religion, atheism may very often be the result of unresolved anger over the seeming unfairness of life. Belief in God, even an unjust God, provides a focus for this anger. People, even firm believers, can be outraged at God and yet, finding their outrage not returned in kind, eventually find also forgiveness and acceptance. The doctrinaire atheist, of course, cannot allow himself this failing of faith, thus, paradoxically, atheism of this sort would seem to defeat its own purpose. However, it would seem that the very act of denying God as such may serve as an expression of anger which brings with it a certain catharsis. While the agnostic can perhaps feel all this emotionally, yet not being able to identify the objects of feeling with any sureness, he or she becomes the more susceptible to repression of anger and the depression that is almost certain to ensue. In fact, Dr. Kübler-Ross had something very interesting to say on this matter: she and her team of counsellors had generally found that when patients were told of their impending deaths, the two types who seemed to achieve acceptance most readily were either strong, even simple, believers on the one hand, or else outright unbelievers, on the other. It seems that those who were weak believers (which implies weak unbelievers as well) had the greatest difficulty in facing the truth. Hate cannot be translated into denial where there is not some residue of affirmation or at least rejected love. One cannot help but wonder if the final "acceptance" offered by a truly rigorous thorough-going atheism would not have to imply a total nihilism, the denial of a value to life or of the evolutionary process itself.

It is most likely for this same or similar reasons that some would protest that the"process" concept of a "suffering God" elicits some alarm, for such a God does not fit the description of the supremely "simple" God of traditional theism, nor does it, on the other hand, provide the easy scapegoat for the atheists' rage.

Aside from these extremes of either total unquestioning belief or of total rejection of all unseen, hence "unproved" values, the problem of anger becomes even more complex. Rumination over the past can always turn up a multitude of shortcomings, of failed commitments, or irresponsible decisions or even occasionally of outright stupidity. No one has a corner on the market for these. Thus for almost every tragedy, even the unpreventable "acts of God", a host of "could have beens"can be conjured up to haunt and taunt us. "If only I had done thus or so..." "If only I had foreseen..." One can torture oneself for life with thoughts like these or die in a state of self-inflicted martyrdom to what needs no proof -- our common humanity. Many apparently choose to do so, living their lives in a prolonged state of depression which amounts to a living suicide. Almost all cases of depression are simply of rage turned against oneself, of anger turned outside in.

Acceptance can be understood according to a wide variety of contexts, ranging from that of terminal patient who knows death is imminent, to the bereaved who know that life must go on. Acceptance also has to cover a wide range of other life possibilities as well, from the very personal but common middle-aged crisis of the possible limits of one's realizable ambitions to the very impersonal but nevertheless very real restrictions placed upon us by economic, political, and social factors that are largely beyond our control. Finally, acceptance can cover a whole spectrum of emotional attitudes ranging from a mild state of depression accompanied by a perpetual attitude of pessimism to a rather buoyant optimism. Within such a wide range of possibilities most people seem to find a fairly comfortable niche; some never quite happy unless they are constantly anticipating some improvement of their situation, no matter how slight, while others, anticipating very little, thrive on being happy with the little they already have. Who is to say what is best?

A lot has to do with how we understand human nature. Most ancient philosophical systems, as well as modern psychological models, understand the human being as basically "homeostatic", that is, finding its well-being to consist in a balanced state of physical and psychological needs and their fulfillment. Thus, for example, the classical Freudian and Adlerian systems of psychiatry held that the pleasure and power drives, respectively, and their proper satisfaction in terms of either gratification or self-actualization, were the key to human happiness and contentment. There can be no doubt that there is a great deal of basic truth in this, which can be ignored only at the risk of great possibility of human psychological distress. Yet, I wonder if it can be the whole truth? Most of all, I wonder what conclusions such a view would lead to when it comes to the matter of accepting loss, suffering, and death?

Would not a "homeostatic" view of life necessarily entail a totally passive view of acceptance? Once the hope of personal fulfillment understood in terms of the enjoyment of power or pleasure seems no longer possible, at that point the logical thing to do would seem to be to simply "call it quits", to no longer try to accomplish anything, to resign oneself to being useless or even to rebel at being a burden on others. If any decisive act could be contemplated in such a situation as viewed from this sort of understanding of life, suicide would appear to be the most logical step. Fortunately, most people are not too logical in the midst of such crises, or we sense our confusion enough to wisely postpone major decisions. In terms of our prevailing culture, this limited view of life's meaning and possibilities looms large when faced with such grimly curtailed possibilities. Usually, if given a chance and proper encouragement, the breakdown of such a limited homeostatic view may very well serve to spur us on to a new, more dynamic view of life and the reasons for living.

How describe such an expanded and dynamic view of life? There seems to be no single word for it. Heterostatic might be a step in that direction, except that stasis or "state" implies something much more fixed than the kind of dynamic that I am attempting to describe. Besides, appeals to another, better state, especially when conceived in terms of another life beyond, can all too easily degenerate into just another state of passivity in the face of evil. On the contrary, what I have in mind is more along the lines of Viktor Frankl's dynamic view of human nature as seeking meaning beyond itself and its selfish concerns -- a view which, in theological terms, one might aptly designate as transcendental. Whatever we wish to call it, it is a view which is definitely not homeostatic and as such refuses to see the meaning of life in terms of egocentric "self- fulfillment", "self-actualization", or "happiness". It is not that it sees anything wrong in these, but on the contrary would promote them just as much as any "homeostatic" view, only (and this is the major difference) by the paradoxical forgetting of or renunciation of these goals as ends in themselves. As Frankl was fond of pointing out, again and again, happiness and fulfillment, if pursued, will never be found; instead, they can only ensue, that is, occur as by-products of living our lives in pursuit of a meaning that transcends our own concerns for fulfillment or happiness. From this point of view, I think, acceptance becomes a very different thing from the passive concept that the word seems to imply.

Acceptance, understood in this way, is highly dynamic, even, up to a point, aggressive, for it is made up of, in almost equal proportions, of humility and ambition. It is humble, first of all, in the root sense of the word, that is, of being "down-to-earth" or completely realistic. It knows that we are limited beings, hemmed in by time, completely finite in our capacities. But its meaning is also ambitious in the sense that it longs for the absolute, for immortality, for infinity, and is brash enough to believe it is possible because it also believes that while much depends on us, not everything depends on us alone. Hence what may seem, in naturalistic terms, an impossible conflict of principles, becomes transformed, in the eyes of faith, into a dynamic source of energy. Acceptance from this point of view is, in effect, an acceptance of the status quo only insofar as it serves to take us beyond it. And to this extent, it is an acceptance of ultimate risk.

Many find this hard to believe. Even for unbelievers, faith would represent a state of absolute security. Is it not "the substance of things hoped-for", the certainty on which we can depend? Perhaps, but I think this is true only in a very paradoxical way. Years ago, during my first assignment in pastoral work, I stopped one day in a hospital room to meet a young man, not because he was on my list of sick parishioners, (which he wasn't) but because someone told me that I should if I wanted to meet someone of extraordinary faith. I had been told that the patient was dying of cystic fibrosis, a childhood disease that kills most of its victims well before adulthood. Having run into this depressing condition in the past, I was expecting the worst -- or at best, an atmosphere of unworldly piety. Quite the contrary, I was surprised to meet a young man in his early twenties who, despite his weakened condition, was very much alive in the face of it all. Despite his chronic condition, with frequent stays in the hospital, I was even more surprised to learn that he was a pre-med student at a local branch of one of our major state universities and that he was very well versed on the statistics of his unlikely survival long enough even to earn his basic college degree. It was as if he had singlemindedly determined that he was going to do all he could possibly do to defeat this disease which had doomed him and so many others. There was little or no pious lugubriousness over his impending death (which he was very much aware of) . Instead he had determined to be a fighter until the last.

But at the same time there was an absolutely astounding sense of faith. It was as if the medical school plans were really but a symbol of something much deeper, a kind of risking of himself in an "impossible dream" which encapsulated a zest for life; but one sensed, almost immediately, that the zest was for something more than this life could ever offer him, yet which could only be his if he lived his life to its very fullest. I came away feeling that here indeed was a young man of faith, not a faith that rested in a security of pious platitudes but a faith that risked itself reaching for an unknown beyond. In this faith there was manifest not so much a difference of quantity such as between one of little faith and much faith, but of quality -- between the fearfulness of the timid believer and the courage of the saint. The young man died not too many weeks later, but few who knew him will ever forget him.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but it proved to be one that also displayed an almost teilhardian note of "convergence", for it was about this time that I first read Teilhard's Divine Milieu after having struggled, half-comprehending, through The Phenomenon of Man. Now that I look back on it, it was this experience of meeting this extraordinary young man in the hospital that exemplified and brought alive the very thing that Teilhard was insisting upon -- that it is only after the activities of a life fully lived that the passivities of suffering can be made to yield their greatest fruit. It is not in any premature capitulation to defeat that a victory can be won. Rather, it is only when there has been a struggle against evil in all its forms up to the last possible moment, that acceptance of the inevitable becomes the moment of true sacrifice, the flames of which alone can transform our lives into a self-offering worthy of God. Only in so doing, can our lives and our work be transfigured into a lasting contribution to the Kingdom of God, an enduring part of the Body of Christ -- our fullest contribution to the Pleroma, the fullness of God.

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