On November 4 last year I had a colonoscopy done. Not because I wanted to, I mean who WANTS to have a colonoscopy…. But because my primary care physician said, “as long as they’re in there taking out your hemorrhoids they may as well do it, you’re way past due.” 

So yeah, this is a bit of TMI but the fact of the matter is, I had hemorrhoids that got bad enough for me to click on WebMD. Of course, EVERYTHING on WebMD from an earache, to a rash, to joint pain, to forgetting a phone number ends up being a fatal cancer of some kind. So, I read the article on hemorrhoids, called a real doctor and made an appointment to have them removed, and went along with getting a colonscopy done 17 years late.

In the meantime, as long as I was burning up deductibles for the year, I decided to make an appointment with a neurologist to evaluate my shaking hands because I suspect from a blind study I did that I have genetic markers for Alzheimer’s. The neurologist said I definitely don’t have Parkinson’s, probably not Alzheimer’s, and I’m well within “neurological specs” for my age so far. So my shaking hands are genetic and just the essential tremors that my Dad has, which means my days of fine finish carpentry and drawing Orthographs are numbered.

When I woke up from the anesthesia from my surgery and colonoscopy… well, dang if WebMD wasn’t right for a change: The doctor said, “Mr. Robinson, you have rectal cancer.” My wife was sitting there at my bedside so I couldn’t hide it from her and break it to her gently later. He went on, “I will refer you to an oncologist and a radiologist and we will need to get some blah blah blah scans done to see if it has spread beyond your lymph nodes into your organs. Then we will go from there. I believe at this stage it is very treatable.” It hit my wife hard. All of our dreams of growing old together after taking care of dying parents for eleven years and counting were now more only a possibility rather than a probability.

My wife realized that I finally had a legitimate reason to die and she knew I was contemplating taking it. She is very aware of my love affair with death. As Facebook says, “It’s Complicated”. I did a podcast on that here a couple years ago if you’re interested. But the cancer probably wasn’t going to be fatal unless I chose to reject treatment.

On our way home she asked the obvious question: “So, what are you going to do?” I told her, “If I knew I had Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, I’d call it a day and just let it go. I wouldn’t put you through that again after taking care of your dad and my parents.” She nodded. “But,” I said, “I think I’d like to stick around and hang out with you for a while longer, and I need to see my parents die before I do, and my grandkids grow up a little so they remember me.”

Over the next few weeks of consultations, I told the doctors I wanted whatever would get me about thirteen years because I was only shooting for 80… What is more than that but toil and travail? They would awkwardly smile and say something like, “Ahem…OK, well then…” They set me up with a regimen of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and two surgeries to remove the cancer and then reattach my colon later. All this is happening while we are trying to care for my dying mother and my increasingly demented and angry father who has creeping congestive heart failure.

So, everyone becomes a theologian or a philosopher when they or a loved one is diagnosed with a fatal disease or has suffered an atrocity. There’s nothing like gross evil or immanent death to make you question why the universe is the way it is and who and where God is.

The flip side is, when people find out you are suffering greatly your friends also become theologians and, even though they are well intentioned with their platitudes, sometimes you end up wrestling with them and their spiritual advice about your suffering more than you do with God.

Theologically, an explanation and advice that we come up with for the problem of pain, no matter how good or bad it is, is called a “Theodicy”:  a theory that explains how can we believe in a God of infinite divine goodness and omnipotence when there is evil and suffering in the world.

The problem is, no matter how smart or spiritual we are, when we are staring in the face of evil and suffering we’re ALL pretty much first year seminary students trying to figure out who God is. Unfortunately, like most first year seminary students we don’t know how nor when to shut up in the face of a mystery.

Epicurus stated the problem of evil and God succinctly three centuries before Christ:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then why is there evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?

Every explanation for the problem of evil no matter how spiritual, ancient, sincere or well reasoned leaves one or more of these issues unresolved. You pick your explanation, you live with some level of rational or gut level discomfort regarding some attribute of God.

Most popular theodicies generally fall into one of these genres: We’ve all seen, heard, and said some or most of these. I got all of these in some form or another on my Facebook posts about my cancer and family situation. Here’s a list of the top responses to suffering I’ve collected over the years:

Everything happens for a reason.

Everything is in God’s hands.

God is preparing you for something.

This is an opportunity to grow in faith.

God works in mysterious ways.

It’s all for your salvation.

All things work together for good if you love the Lord.

It’s the natural consequences of your sinfulness or stupidity. (Specifically regarding my cancer, maybe you shouldn’t have eaten gas station hot dogs for breakfast for the last 40 years (which is probably true).

It’s just a fallen world and bad stuff happens to good people (and good things happen to bad people) for no apparent reason. It just is what it is.

On the surface these sound biblical, spiritual, and somewhat hopeful. But not far below the surface, they turn dark under Epicurus’scrutiny. Many of these counsels have overlapping ideas and common problems, so I’ll try to be succinct.

I have many difficult and painful intersecting moving parts in my life right now. Someone sent me the counsel that “it’s all for your salvation” and along with it a pious story by Elder Cleopa that was supposed to illustrate the point and gift wrap several of these ideas in one fell parabolic swoop. The short version of the parable is, a hermit was doubting God, so God sent a monk to instruct him. The hermit traveled with the monk. Along the way the monk stole a silver vessel, killed a family’s dog, broke a child’s arm, burned down a house that sheltered some orphans, and burned down the house of a childless couple. The mystery reveal of the story was that the monk was actually an angel of God. He stole the silver vessel because it was stolen from a monastery and God had cursed the family because of it and by stealing it back he released the family from the curse. He killed the dog because it was rabid and broke the child’s arm because he foresaw that the boy was going to grow up to be a thief and he wouldn’t be able to steal as much as an adult with a broken arm. He burned the house down because there was silver hidden in it and the children used the silver to go live with a bishop and the boys became priests and the girls found husbands, and he burned the childless couple’s house down because the couple was cursed by God because the husband built the house with ill gotten money, so by burning the offending house down he released them from God’s curse of childlessness. The moral of the story concluded with this admonition from the angel to the unbelieving hermit:

Do you understand now? God’s mercy for people is shown in everything, but they don’t see it and can’t understand it. The Lord never commits evil. But people look at His works as misfortunes and sorrows, while the Lord does these things only for the sake of good and for their correction. Therefore, do not look at the external side, but try to see God’s all-encompassing justice in everything.

I have read similar pious stories of bad things happening that end up being providentially good in a big picture we cannot see, but in the end they are just badly contrived parables that sound like a script for a monastic Hallmark movie. St. Theophan the Recluse said that all the hard situations in our life are sent to us by God, so that means that God (or His appointed agents) do in fact actively kill, maim, curse, give diseases, or passively permit evil to teach some divine lesson and to orchestrate some divinely appointed outcome for each individual person. But, if God is omnipotent then why couldn’t the divine lesson be taught or outcome be reached without God actively inflicting suffering, pain, evil and even death? If we believe “everything happens for a reason” then that ultimately means God has some giant divine jig saw puzzle He is dropping pieces into for some big picture we obviously cannot see or know, and some of those pieces are heinous, horrifying, torturous evils that are either perpetrated by God or permitted by Him “for a reason”. I am hard pressed to even imagine what reason could be good enough or big picture be wonderful enough for God to inflict or orchestrate some of the horrific atrocities I’ve seen in my years on earth.

Of course, some will say that Sts. Cleopa and Theophan (and others) are technically incorrect (or misinterpreted) and that God is not actively creating or inflicting the evil and pain. Some would say WE are responsible for the evil by virtue of the fall even if we have not personally committed a specific atrocity. So in this theory God is not creating evil but is passively permitting it and in His divine power and providence working it all out as it by the seat of His pants as it happens on the fly for some good outcome down the line somewhere in life that is not yet determined because not every evil has happened yet. Of course, the question is: If God has the power to work out evil and turn it into good on the fly, why can’t he just stop it before it happens? Wouldn’t that be less work in the long run and look a lot more like He loves the innocent victims? Personally, I find the passive God of providence even less palatable because even as finite, sinful human beings we are outraged by and hold human beings morally culpable if they stand by and watch an evil act and have the ability to stop it, but do nothing. By believing that God cannot or will not control evil even though He is capable, but will only tinker with it after the fact, we hold God to a lower standard of compassion and mercy and ethics than we do fallen human beings.

And a couple quick loose end observations:

Yes, I know the Bible says everything is in God’s hands, but being in God’s hands does necessarily mean that God is in control of what’s in His hands, only that He is holding all things. Being in His hands does not necessarily make what’s in His hands good. I’ve had lots of things in my hands that were broken, bad, ugly, stinky, and toxic. Because I’m holding a handful of worms does not mean I am in control of them.

And, there IS Romans 8:28: However, “all things working together for good” is obviously not a micromanagement policy of evil and suffering in this life because the fact is that people suffer and die and they nor their survivors may never see any good come from it in their lifetimes.

So, God obviously doesn’t intervene in all evil and suffering, but it is also obvious biblically and anecdotally that He DOES intervene in some cases. The story of Joseph in the Old Testament comes to mind. It seems God had some hand in Joseph’s life and many other biblical characters’ lives either actively or after the fact providentially. But I’m not sure their lives are applicable to our ordinary sufferings because we, for the most part, are not Biblical characters chosen by God to preserve a nation that is destined to bring about the salvation of humanity nor serve as a witness to the Gospel at its inception. While my default regarding miracles is skepticism, I do believe in the possibility of divine intervention and I’m no stranger to claims of the miraculous going way back to my parochial school days and then the Jesus Movement of the ‘60’s. I’ve heard tons of personal testimonies of miracles happening like they did in biblical times. And they are exactly like Biblical times: some people get healed and most don’t and no one knows why one gets a miracle and not the other. It is not a question of God having the power to heal, it is a question of His will to heal specific people.

Since becoming Orthodox 22 years ago, I have a dozen vials of holy oils from monasteries and from relics that I’ve collected and that people have sent to me from pilgrimages to holy sites. I’ve owned dozens of relics (including a piece of the Cross) and have wondered why some relics and oils heal and others don’t even if they are from the same saint or object. You would think that if one piece of the Cross or oil from a saint heals some people that all pieces of the Cross and oil from the same saint would be equally powerful and miraculous for all people. If the power is objectively in the relic because of its union with God, and it is not the power or faith of the possessor of the relic, nor the worthiness of the sick person then why don’t they work equally on everyone? Here we have to be careful. Once you say, wellllll it’s YOUR lack of faith that prevents you from being healed, then we’ve just imported Protestant charismatic snake handling and prosperity gospel theology into Orthodoxy. In the end we’re left with the fact that miraculous relics are just mysteriously fickle and unreliable for suffering people as God Himself is, it seems.

I’ve been told countless times that all of my current circumstances, caregiving my parents for the past five years, my cancer diagnosis among other sundry ordinary life inconveniences are all given to me for my salvation. Sure, I get that salvation is partly about sinning, repenting, learning your hard lessons and taking your consequences. I can take full responsibility for eating hot dogs for breakfast for 40 years and getting cancer. Lesson learned, I won’t eat hot dogs every morning for forty years again. And that’s probably one of my easier lessons in life, actually. But outside of personal responsibility and repenting for my sin and stupidity, what is my salvific lesson that MUST be taught to me by my mother lying in bed like an infant, her mind gone, suffering physically and mentally and my dad spiraling into angry dementia and inexorable congestive heart failure that cannot be taught to me in another way? Why do the innocent have to suffer to teach ME a lesson as if I am all that important that they have to endure years of pain for me to get some point from God? I don’t deny that I’m learning some hard lessons about myself watching them die. But certainly, if God is God He should have an infinite number of lesson plans available that don’t involve my parents (or your child or spouse) enduring a tortured existence or slowly dying in pain.

And then there is the ever popular, even among the saints “God doesn’t send you more than you can handle”. This again makes God the agent of inflicting pain and suffering, and if not creating it, at least allowing it in a divine calculation of how much pain you can stand to bear. To me this sounds more like the Inquisition than a loving presence.

The obvious question is, if “God doesn’t send more than you can handle” then why are there suicides? Even if we think the promise is only for faithful Christians (which makes God a monster), why do Christians commit suicide? Either way, believers or not, obviously some people got more than they could handle: So, did God miscalculate? Did He not care? Did He just stand idly by while sorrow piled upon despair and eventually He makes a liar out of Isaiah and the dim candle was extinguished and the bent reed was broken by life? Evidence plainly contradicts the platitude.

When speaking about suffering to someone in pain, we have to realize that pain is not a spiritual contest. One person’s ability to suffer gracefully and endure is incomparable to another’s. Each person’s experience of and thresh hold for pain is different. It offers no hope to tell someone who is experiencing trouble in life or perhaps contemplating suicide that there are people who have it worse than they do and are muddling through it all just fine. It only serves to let them know that the terror of their existence can and might get worse and God may not do anything about that either.

To paraphrase Patrick Carnegie Simpson on the mystery of suffering: “It is no help to believe that in the end it will all be made clear—to think of God as holding a sealed envelope with the explanation of the mystery that He will give to us some day when we’re dead. A God who has a secret explanation for our suffering is not enough for us in this life. The poor parent’s heart, torn with the suffering of a tortured, dying child, has greater love in it than a coldly wise and watching Deity with His secret final reason for everything and who does nothing.”

After 50 years of reading on the problem of pain, including what people say is an “Orthodox mindset” or “Patristic phronema” regarding suffering, after living for 67 years when we encounter horrific evil, pain, and suffering, it all ends up sounding like Job’s comforters trying to convince us that our individual life is a Hallmark movie fraught with painful events, but there WILL be a happy ending because God was writing the script and directing the movie all along (and some might add, IF we are believing and not TOO doubtful).

Of course the complicated crux of the matter for both the atheist and any religion is a concept of the nature of the universe and a cosmic power, a theology or philosophy that accounts for futility, dissolution and death, and a view of the nature and will of the human being that chooses evil in spite of the consequences. Whether we are philosophers, seminary graduates or just a regular Christian muddling through the Bible on our own, our explanations sound good on paper until evil happens to you or a loved one. When it does, all theodicies become straw and stubble. For Christians in particular, the fact of the matter is even if you have great faith in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God that is no guarantee that you nor the people you pray for will be spared evil and suffering. And, as I’ve already pointed out, in some theodicies, God inflicts it all on you for some reason known only to Him.

Perhaps it is all much simpler and much darker and much lighter than all that: All creation groans in futility under the weight of evil and death. Except for God randomly and inscrutably showing up once in a while for selected people, (who eventually all die anyway no matter how great the miracle), most of the human race faces suffering with only a vague hope that it all might mean something perhaps now, and if not now, at least in the end. So, no matter how many footnotes or scriptures your beliefs have or how strong your faith is, in the end it boils down to you picking a mystery that makes sense to you and gets you through the night so you can believe that God has not abandoned you or your loved ones even though everything points to that.

For me at this time in my life, I don’t look for a grand providential reason for every event in my life whether good or bad. I don’t look for signs and wonders pointing to some divine purpose or outcome for my life. I don’t believe God is micromanaging or orchestrating the atrocities and the horrors of human evil, suffering and death to teach every individual some specific lesson for some personal spiritual growth. We live in a fallen world and good and evil human beings kill both the evil and the good, the rain falls on the just and the unjust, evil prospers, good is punished, and the final ending of all created things in death even eventually claimed God Himself on a cross when He became human.

In the end, when we are faced with certain death, the pain is unbearable, no philosophical paradigms or faith or promises assuage our suffering, there is no comfort found on earth, and God stands silently by, we can only rage into the darkness: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And there is no response. There is only ungodly silence. What then? We are left with only two options: Curse God and die, as Job’s wife counseled, or, like Christ, commit our spirit into His hands that hold all things in heaven and on earth including all the evil, pain, suffering and the horror of death.

Our only true hope is that everything in creation, including suffering, evil, pain and death will all be summed up in Christ as St. Paul says in Ephesians and Colossians. The only “reason” in God in the end is Himself who IS infinite love. God was in Christ reconciling the fallen world and all of its senseless, random, human and unnatural evil, pain, and suffering to Himself, for no reason or purpose except that He is love and could do nothing else. The only good and salvation is God Himself, not a predetermined individual utilitarian purpose or spiritualized Hallmark outcome for my life. All I know anymore is that nothing is lost in God, love will win out in the end, and we just have to not let evil and death beat our hope in infinite love out of us in this life.

And, a final caveat: Maybe I just got messed up reading too many books. With greater knowledge comes greater pain, as Solomon said, and I don’t discount the idea that there just might be a reason for everything, it’s all for my salvation, God is doing the best He can with what He’s got and has to work in mysterious ways and I just lack faith. Either way, God is still love…. Thank God.