The Shadow of a Tree

After the flood

A group of first responders takes hands to pray around a giant cross. They are in Kerr County, Texas, arrived to search and care for victims of the Guadalupe River flood. Not far away, the body of a 9-month-old baby has been found in the debris.

As I write, the death toll has risen to 120. Seven are from the girls’ side of Camp Mystic, ages 8-15, whose cabins were inexorably swept away in the blink of an eye. Richard “Dick” Eastland, the camp’s owner and director, was swept away with them when he rushed to help. This is a beautiful tribute to the man these girls looked up to like a grandfather.

The Washington Post has a haunting profile of one father’s search for his still-lost little one, selflessly doing what he can for other families along the way. He walks past the place where they found Dick with the ones he couldn’t save. He picks his way through a cabin full of the things left behind—sodden stuffies, charm bracelets, snapshots on the wall. This cabin housed 14 girls, all still unaccounted for. He tries to grab something for all of their parents. Later, he spots a body, but it’s not his daughter. He alerts the authorities and keeps walking, past the piles of soaked mattresses, past the other fathers and grandfathers sorting through tiny girl belongings.

While he’s giving his interview, a man overhears and walks up with his phone held out. “Did the girl you found look like her?” She didn’t. The man turns and walks away.

I debated whether to write anything about any of this, because it feels impossible to do so without lapsing into clichés, or simply feeling like you’ve reduced human agony to Content. But Rod Dreher posted an old essay by David Bentley Hart, written after the tsunami in Haiti, that I’ve been turning over for a few days. I’m not normally a Hart reader, but parts of the essay cut through the fog that can cloud terrible moments like this. He is brusque with the glib atheist who pounces to gloat “Hey CHRISTIANS,” but he’s also not gentle with certain types of Christians who seize the chance to justify the ways of God to man, in their particular tone-deaf fashion. He quotes from an actual post-tsunami letter to the Wall Street Journal editors that described God as the “balancer of accounts,” by whom “punishments and rewards [are] distributed according to our just desserts [sic],” because some people are more guilty of original sin than others. Thus, the writer argued, we must conclude that the suffering of innocents will bear “spiritual fruit for themselves and for all mankind.”

To hell with all that, Hart says, literally. And to hell with any theodicy that insists every obscene moment of suffering, torture, and death is indispensably freighted with purpose, such that God’s plans for the human race literally could not come to fruition without it. Speaking for himself, he believes “there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel—and none in which we should find more comfort—than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all.”

I think the phrase “considered in themselves” is doing a lot of work here. If I’m understanding Hart’s whole argument correctly, he’s not saying that suffering can’t shape us in meaningful ways, or that there is no meaning to be found when we look to the cross. But perhaps he would say that the cross is meaningful in part because on it, Christ shared in our sense of meaninglessness. That is of course not all I believe Christ was doing on it, and Hart’s universalism hovers implicitly behind the bits of the essay where he asserts that Christ’s death was not the only possible means of reuniting God and man. I don’t believe one has to be a universalist to find moments in his argument here that ring true. Still, perhaps it’s because I do see the cross as necessary for our salvation, in some awful mysterious sense I don’t fully comprehend, that I hesitate with fear and trembling at the bold assertion that “suffering and death have no ultimate meaning at all.”

Two Catholic sisters were found dead in each other’s arms, holding rosaries. For them, the cross certainly had a meaning. The cross had literally all the meaning there was left for them to cling to. There is, to be sure, a danger that in attempting to dignify their deaths, we will stumble into the pitfall of pious cant. Hart clearly sees and urges us to avoid that pitfall. But I see a ditch on the other side as well, in which we fail properly to honor their own faith—this faith of blood and sweat and lungs starved for air.

The psychologist Rollo May wrote a book called Man’s Search for Himself, riffing on Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It includes a passage about the particular neuroses of religious patients, included to aid his readers in “distinguishing what aspects of religion aid in the discovery of one’s personal values and what aspects do not.” One persistent pattern he observes is that religious people come into the office shattered because they have gone through life believing in what he calls their “divine right to be taken care of.” It’s as if they thought they’d signed a contract with God: I obey, you take care of me. They obeyed, but God broke his side of the deal:

Of course they have been told, “God will take care of you,” from the early days when they sang the song in Sunday school to the present vulgarized form of the same idea in many movies. But on a deeper level, the demand to be taken care of—particularly since hostility arises so quickly when it is frustrated—is a function of something more profound. I believe it gets its dynamic from the fact that these persons have had to give up so much. They have had to relinquish their power and their right to make moral judgments to their parents, and naturally the other half of the unwritten contract is that they then have a right to depend entirely on parental power and judgment, as a slave has a right to depend upon his master. So they are being gypped if the parent—or more likely the parental substitutes such as the therapist or God—does not extend them special care.

It is true that we do children no favors when we give them vacuous promises. I’m not saying “God Will Take Care of You” should never be taught or sung, but I believe it’s true in ways more mysterious than are immediately clear from a simplistic reading of the lyrics. It’s certainly not true in the sense that God promises to spare His children from fire, flood, plague, or even worse. But perhaps we might say it is true in the more unnerving sense captured by T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker”:

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

Rollo May does not believe this either, of course. He delivers his cynical psychoanalysis as a man with the luxury of believing nothing in particular.

“Suffering,” Nicholas Wolterstorff writes in his fine book Lament for a Son, “is the shout of ‘No’ by one’s whole existence to that over which one suffers—the shout of ‘No’ by nerves and gut and gland and heart to pain, to death, to injustice, to depression, to hunger, to humiliation, to bondage, to abandonment. And sometimes, when the cry is intense, there emerges a radiance which elsewhere seldom appears: a glow of courage, of love, of insight, of selflessness, of faith. In that radiance we see best what humanity was meant to be.” The loss of this truth lurks in that other ditch, even though we balk at the notion of a divine bean-counting calculus whereby so many units of suffering are necessary for so many units of radiance. It’s that sort of bean-counting that is evoked by the sorts of theodicies Hart hates so much.

I understand why he hates them, but I also see in them a (very clumsy, very imperfect) attempt to capture this inescapable sense that in our lives, in this world, horror and glory are somehow intertwined. It is there in the sisters clutching their rosaries. It is there in the image of the first responders taking hands to pray. It is there, in the shadow of a tree.

“It is said of God,” Wolterstorff says, “that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor.”