My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3 #33, February 16, 1998

STUCK TOGETHER WITH GOD'S GLUE

All God's children come to harm
There's no reason for alarm. Let them play
Richard Butler

I've always had kind of a problem with people who, confronted by injury or loss, wring their hands and moan, "Why ME?" (a phrase that tends not to occur to them when they win the lottery). After all, why NOT me? Doesn't the fact that noone gets out of this world alive suggest that bad things are inevitable for everyone? And in a world in which tornadoes and fire, car crashes and floods, randomly happen, why should any of us get to be exempt?

We've come a long way in America from our Puritan founders whose religion told them that whatever happened to them, good or bad, was predestined, was in fact God's will for them. If a mother had to watch helplessly while smallpox killed her children, that was no more arbitrary than any other hardship God had doled out to her. The Puritans knew their job was acceptance, bearing up with fortitude and continuing to do what needed to be done. It was a useful religion for people making a hardscrabble living in a hostile environment, beset by scarcity and disease.

In the 19th century, though, as times got a little easier, many Americans wanted a gentler religion that demanded less of them and offered more rewards. Good works crept into the theology, not as things one did because it was the right thing to do, but because one was bargaining with God--if I do good works, in return God should make me happy. Robert G. Ingersoll, an orator who preached against religious dogma, did much to advance the notion that if you lived a good life, cared about people, could cry over the death of little Nell, you DESERVED to be happy regardless of your beliefs, regardless of how faithfully you carried out the rules of your religion.

This notion seems to persist in America--if you work hard and play by the rules, if you're kind, if you don't kick the cat, you deserve to have a nice home, a loving spouse, adorable children who grow up to be admirable human beings. And when something awful happens, when your house vanishes under flood waters, when your daughter is stricken with cancer, when your wife gets in the way of a berserk man with an AK-47-- or even when you find you are no longer loved--you don't have that certain knowledge the harsh religion of the puritans taught: Bad things will happen and your job is to endure.

In its absence, many Americans seem to assume that because these accidents of fate are undeserved, somebody must be at fault. If we can find out whose fault it is, we can file a lawsuit and demand damages. We may even win. But it may not give us satisfaction.

Blaming, suing, collecting money in return for pain, may restore some sense of justice, but it can also be a way of letting outselves off the hook. As long as we are stuck in the blame game, we don't need to grow, accept our own responsibility, if any, for our disaster, come to terms with it, or even accept that the world is an unjust place. Because we are official victims, we can and do claim endless sympathy.

To lean on others in the freshness of loss is natural. We all need to mourn, to talk about what we cherished and lost. It's important for us to have people to listen to us, touch us, hug us, comfort us. I do my share of all of that for the people I love.

But ultimately, we are our own salvage crews, and I lose patience with people who continue to lean, continue to claim their victim status long after the loss. Eventually we all must make our adjustments, financial, physical, emotional, and mental. You see, I truly believe that what happens to us is never as important as what we do about it. How do we USE our pain and anger? Eugene O'Neill says that "Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue." To me, what makes any of us interesting is the way we've mended the broken pieces. Some of us are driven outward by anger, like Candy Lightner who fought to change the laws when she realized her daughter died at the hands of a long-time drunk driver. Some of us are driven inward by pain, to self-knowledge, or philosophy, or poetry or art.

I'm not convinced that any of us DESERVE happiness. In fact, I kind of like Leo Rosten's idea that we were not put into this world to be happy but to be useful. But I AM sure that being happy all the time would be self-defeating--without contrasting anguish, can you even recognize that you are happy? Continuous happiness would create a kind of lethargy, I think, that would not move us to change, to risk what we have, to stretch ourselves.

Courage, strength, compassion for the pain of others, outrage against injustice-- these are not born into us. More often they are the product of the losses that try our souls and show us who we are, test us and show us what we are capable of becoming. They are the result of sticking ourselves back together again with God's glue. Without that suffering, we are as pretty and unblemished and plastic as a Barbie doll. And as empty.