Quotable: Live Without Explanation

Found in a blog post entitled "Grief, Faith, and Friendship" from The Other Journal. From Christianity, Democracy, and The Radical Ordinary by Romand Coles and Stanley Hauerwas:

"Crucial for me is the presumption that the gospel is a story meant to train us to live without explanation. Explanation presumes that if I can just account for why what happened did happen, then I will be able to live with what has happened… I think Christianity is the training for learning how to live without being in control: you learn to live in the silences, and you learn what the politics* of living in the silences might look like… But to learn patiently in a world where you have no answers, it seems to me, gives you political alternatives that otherwise would not exist—through hope… I assume that God will show up in all different kinds of ways. That’s how I try to conceive of what it means to live hopefully without explanation. You don’t try to explain the death of a child. That will kill you. That will kill you."

I exert so much energy asking "Why?" and trying to fix things or heal things. I am a compulsive systems thinker and an omnivoracious reader, so accounting for 'why' is not usually the problem, at least not on a practical level. The problem is that the answers I find are often harder to live with than the initial questions. There's no good reason for famine, for AIDS, for slavery, for poisoned water and air, for food and medicine that sicken rather than nourishing and healing, for a financial system that gives bailouts to bankers while honest people who have worked all their lives lose their homes and land, for expensive machines engineered specifically to kill people who can't fight back. There's just no good reason. Though I could run my mouth for hours about any of the above, the practical explanation demands an existential explanation that eludes human understanding. Take a shot at the existential explanations and you've got two destinations that I can see: mystery (which is another word for faith) or despair.

I am getting better at letting go and at living with unknowns and ambiguity, though if you know me or read this blog very often you know that my morbid curiosity is alive and kicking and I'm still plenty fond of trying to explain. When I forget for even a few minutes that I'm just one small creature, not God, and therefore have no business trying to get my head around the universe, the want of explanation starts tearing me apart. Coles and Hauerwas are right. It will kill you.

Striving is not all bad—I believe that as creatures we are all here to serve a purpose and to do good work with the time, energy, and capacities that are given to us. Fixing and healing is part of that, as is being lovingly present with others in their explanationless grief and unanswerable 'whys,' not turning our back or averting our eyes having concluded ahead of time that God will not show up. Grieving is not all bad, either. If you are alive and paying any amount of attention, you are aware that there are good reasons to grieve. Absence of grief is probably an indication of denial, apathy, or hate, and I'm pretty sure those things are all bad. Faith and love require grieving for the things that grieve God and grieving alongside those God loves, which is everybody.

Hope is not naive optimism or happiness that depends on earplugs and blinders to shut out our neighbors' cries. Hope means standing up in the dark, broken world and proclaiming, "There is something more!" Hope means looking at the world's casualties and certified lost causes, imagining what could happen with a little grace, and rolling up our sleeves to pitch in. Hope means telling resignation to shut up because some of us are trying to make life worth living here. Hope means deciding that even though you can't feed all the children or save all the trees or stop all the wars, you can make a difference for that one, or those two, or three. "Hope," as I wrote in an essay awhile ago, "means living like the Resurrection is true." (I’m not sure I know what that means, either. But I believe it with all of my heart. Most days.)

Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, gratitude also deserves a mention. On the positive side of 'why', "Why anything?" Why life? Why love? Why friends? Why babies? Why light? Why color? Why flavor? Why beauty? Why music? Why flowers? Why sunsets? Why fire? Why stars? (I could also give you a technical explanation for most of those, which would be missing the point of them entirely.) If there's no reason for anything, and no Reason behind everything that is, why is there so much good? And why does it hurt so much when the good things of this world get damaged or taken away from us? Just as there are always good reasons to grieve, there are always good reasons to celebrate. What are you grateful for? Do you take time to delight in those things often enough? Who are you grateful for? Do you tell them so? Often enough?

Tomorrow as you gather around the table, take** a few moments to grieve with those whose tables are empty or who have empty places at the table. Take the rest of the day to celebrate the abundant goodness that is given to us not by any nation-state or because we deserve it, but by the mystery of provision through the goodness of God's creation. Celebrate and hope.

Endnotes:
*'Politics' as Hauerwas and others use the term means a lot more than American presidential elections and red-state/blue-state ideological categories. Politics in this sense includes anything having to do with the ordering and governance of human society, from friendships and households to local churches to the nation-state to the whole planet.

**With all due gratitude for the rich vocabulary of my native language, I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the selection of verbs relating to time. 'Taking', 'making', 'spending', 'managing', and 'saving' none feel right.