Anybody who offers up a pat answer to the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” is just selling some light-weight brand of snake oil. If not snake oil, then at least junk food. It took Job, of the Bible, a full forty-two chapters of trying to answer that question before he discovered what a fool’s errand he was on. Eventually, he placed a respectful finger over his mouth and stood silent in the face of the breathtakingly lofty dimensions of human suffering.
Of all the modalities of explanation, it’s really the poets and story-tellers who best cover this territory. That’s because they don’t try to cover it at all. Instead, they provide the profound service of pointing to the moon, while never confusing their finger for the moon. J.R.R. Tolkien did just that in his final, posthumous novel, The Silmarillion.
Stuffed with more characters and localities than Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I found it a ponderous read—except for the part where he describes the creation of the world. In his homemade Genesis story, the character of God creates a world and its universe through the use of a cosmic symphony. When the celestial band’s flutes play high notes, stars spring into the sky. Bass notes summon deep waters to fill the oceans . . . and so on. Part way into this scene intrudes the evil character who attempts to sabotage all of creation by banging out discordant notes to disrupt the harmonic symphony. Interestingly, the God character doesn’t take up battle against the saboteur. Hardly seems to notice him! Rather, the Cosmic Conductor simply shifts the symphony to weave the formerly discordant notes into a new pattern of beauty and harmony.
If you’re a regular SMC reader, you may have noticed two distinct characters over the course of the last two articles. They appeared to be as different as night and day. The first article described a dad who inherited a kind of magic from his dad. He regularly delighted and entertained people with nothing more than his zany, uplifting presence—especially with little kids, especially with his own kids. The second story, told last week, described a very different sort of character. This second fella would come home some nights a “wet drunk.” On other nights, he’d come home a “dry drunk.” This second man wielded a different, darker brand of magic when it came to his wife and kids. Funny thing about these two characters, they actually weren’t “two” characters. They were the same man: my dad.
In some ways, that was the hardest part of it for me. The same guy who could be physically, emotionally, and psychologically abusive, could turn around and be incredibly loving—sometimes in the same episode of physical or emotional violence. That’s what made it so hard to figure out. For many years, I couldn’t find a label or a file-folder to put my experience into. As a psychotherapist, I regularly helped clients name their abuse and trauma. Until fairly recently, I never felt like my experience reached a high enough threshold to claim the healing that goes with those words. I don’t think that anymore.
I’ve come to see that inner healing begins with the proper names for things. I came to see that the source of my trauma wasn’t only in the abuse. Its power and durability proceeded from its inability to be named. My dad was a profoundly good man. When a good and loving man does things to you that are neither one of those two things, it’s hard to apply the rightful and healing names for what that is. Almost feels overly dramatic, or unmanly. I’ve come to see that it’s just the opposite. It takes courage to name what’s true.
What I like about J.R.R. Tolkien’s image in the story I reference earlier is that it provides a space to call things by their rightful names. He avoids that annoying, breezy kind of spirituality that Karl Marx called “the opiate of the masses.” For example, is there anything good about a man abusing his son? Like other discordant notes that bang around, mucking up creation, the answer is NO! Some things are just plain abuse. Some things are just plain evil.
What I also like about Tolkien’s insight is that evil never gets the last word. We get to be co-conductors of our own lives, even when our lives have been disrupted by a saboteur. My pathway from simply being wounded to becoming a wounded healer involved a combination of God’s grace, and my hard work. By grace, I stumbled into many of the tools recommended in resilience and happiness research (mentors, aerobic exercise in nature, close friends, psychotherapy). By the combination of grace, and my hard work, I’ve taken up those tools and exercised them according to my own capacities, that I chose to develop.
Dialogue
Divide your life into sections; early childhood, elementary school, high school, college, young adulthood, and middle age until the present. For each section of your life, can you name the discordant notes that disrupted your harmony?
In retrospect, which of those disruptions proved to be the most disruptive?
Looking back, was there a saboteur in your life? To name them that way, doesn’t require that they consciously set out to sabotage you.
Can you identify what came your direction, by way of grace to sweep those discordant notes up into a new harmony? In other words, what factors healed you, even if only just a little bit?
What are some things you did on purpose that made you a co-conductor of your own healing?
What could use a little more healing work in your life right now?
Do you have a plan outlined that could provide a container for some more healing grace to flow into your life? What would you have to do to set that process in motion? Is anything getting in the way of your doing that?