Better Than Television

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Theodicy in Kolkata - Hauerwas on Suffering

Next day, as the ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were picking up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair knew that a gray spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died."

-E. B. White, Charlotte's Web


Living with people who are suffering is uncomfortable. One reason I'm in India is to learn from the vast experience of the Missionaries of Charity, how to love these people. It has been interesting to watch how the sisters and long term volunteers deal with suffering patients. I remember on my first day at Prem Dan (the home for mentally and physically handicapped men where I volunteer), an experienced American volunteer just sat with a patient for most of the morning. I was irritated by this because I was busy working and expected him to be sweating too. I was trying to be "useful". I've started to learn though, that there are more important things to be than "useful".

If suffering led me to try to be useful then it also forced
questions about why suffering exists in the first place. Why is there suffering in the world? Can a good God really be responsible for all this? If so is he as good or powerful as we are told? Stanley Hauerwas opens his book, God, Medicine and Suffering by stating, "It is one thing to think that 'the problem of evil' can be answered by the 'free will' defense or explained through human sin; it's quite another to confront the illness of a child” (p.1). These are questions of theodicy, how we understand God in relation to evil, and they are plentiful in Kolkata.

Hauerwas proposes that the questions of innocent suffering require a response rather than and answer. He points to the early church and explains, "For the early Christians, suffering and evil...did not have to be 'explained'. Rather what was required was the means to go on even if the evil could not be 'explained.' Indeed it was crucial that such suffering or evil not be 'explained'--that is, it was important not to provide a theoretical account of why such evil needed to be in in order that certain good results occur, since such an explanation would undercut the necessity of the community capable of absorbing the suffering” (p. 49). It is Hauerwas' proposition that, "the creation of the problem of evil is a correlative of the creation of a god, that it was presumed, could be known separate from a community of people at worship” (p. 41). A theoretical god needs a theory to explain suffering while a real and living God only requires a real and living response from his people to the suffering they encounter. But what should this response look like here in Kolkata or back home in Calgary?

The first step should be to respond as the biblical heroes did, turning their laments to God as exemplified in the psalms. Hauerwas quotes from Walter Brueggemann's book The Message of the Psalms which states, "The Psalms of lament do not simply reflect our experience; they are meant to name the silences that or suffering has created. They bring us into communion with God and one another, communion that makes it possible to acknowledge our pain and suffering, to rage that we see no pint to it, and yet our very acknowledgment of that fact makes us a people capable of living faithfully....For creation is not as it ought to be” (pp. 82-83). These psalms give us permission to have frank conversations with our creator about the pain and anguish we experience. When we piously try to "protect" God from our problems we isolate ourselves from both this God and one another.

The second step of our response to suffering should be to understand (and help others understand) suffering as part of our life story. Hauerwas explains, "The appeal to narrative at least has the advantage of reminding us that our lives and our deaths are not occasional bits of unconnected behavior but part of a larger pattern; recognizing this gives purpose to our lives. When such a pattern is thought to be missing, death and illness cannot help but seem pointless and meaningless. As a result illness and death can be seen only as something to deny” (p.112).

Hauerwas goes on to discuss in detail the relationship between the practice of medicine and a patients narrative. He says, "The clinician who seeks the patient's well-being is necessarily constrained by the narrative unity into which he or she has entered” (p. 120). It has been my experience that these physicians are rare partly because it is a difficult job to help a patient see there life in terms of a narrative. The vast majority of patients see there illnesses and deaths as things to be avoided or fixed. Hauerwas states, "The physician may be able to help the patient cope with her pain, but if the patient lacks any substantive narrative, the physician cannot provide a meaning for ineliminable pain. We thus begin to understand why we are condemned to live out only narratives that we believe to be fiction since we are their arbitrary authors--because we lack a shared narrative” (p. 125). If such a shared narrative existed, although it would not make our suffering any less, it would provide a context in which to understand it. Hauerwas believes that such a context does exist, "...we are all, adults and children alike, born into a narrative not of our own making--that is, we are creatures of a gracious God who discover that precisely because we are such we do not have to make up our lives” (p. 126). It is within this narrative that we are to live (and die).

Our third, and probably most important, step as we respond to suffering should be to simply be with those who suffer. We were created to live in community and this should not be forgotten when we encounter suffering. In opposition to the passage from Charlotte's Web at the beginning of this blog, where E. B White describes the heroine Charlotte’s death, Hauerwas says, "It may be that spiders are destined to die alone, but as those who believe that we are destined to enjoy one another and God, we cannot allow ourselves and loved ones so to die. We have no theodicy that can soften the pain of our death and the death of our children, but we believe that we share a common story which makes it possible for us to be with one another especially as we die” (p. 148).

"To be with one another as we die," is the skill that I am leaning from the sisters and volunteers here in Kolkata. We provide the daily necessities of course, but lots of space is left to sit with the patients. Mother Teresa believed that this is more important; "As far as I am concerned, the greatest suffering is to feel alone, unwanted, unloved. The greatest suffering is also having noo one, forgetting what an intimate, truly human relationship is, not knowing what it means to be loved, not having a family or friends." More than learning how to be useful to dying patients I'm leaning how to be with dying patients. In his book Lament For A Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff offers this concluding advice spoken out of his own grief:


Death is awful, demonic. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it's not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit beside me on my mourning bench.

-Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament For A Son

19 Comments:

  • hey Luke, it's Meghan here :)...I am so interested in what you've had to say about the problem of suffering. It reminds me of my Soci of Compassion class at U of C in which we defined compassion as simply being with someone in their passions - the good and the bad. So that makes me just think that the answer to the problem of suffering is simply compassion. It's so great to see that both christians and nonchristians alike are figuring this out and acting on it. Excittinnnnng!!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 5:06 PM  

  • Meghan,
    Thanks for reading my blog. Yeah I think I agree with you. Compassion needs to be defined as an active endeavor rather that just a fuzzy feeling.
    Luke

    By Blogger Luke, at 10:34 PM  

  • Wolterstorff's quote rings true. I recently lost my grandfather and one of the thoughts that comforted me was the notion that I was not alone in my grief. I knew that my friends "were there" with me, holding my hand (so to speak).

    By Blogger Hi, at 12:57 PM  

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