Francis is a Chemist; Chemists Seek Out Surprises

Not everyone is in love with Pope Francis’ remarks at the beatification of Blessed Paul VI, in particular they don’t like all that talk of surprises:

This is the perennial newness to be discovered each day, and it requires mastering the fear which we often feel at God’s surprises.

God is not afraid of new things! That is why he is continually surprising us, opening our hearts and guiding us in unexpected ways. He renews us: he constantly makes us “new”. A Christian who lives the Gospel is “God’s newness” in the Church and in the world. How much God loves this “newness”!

People are suspicious of this language of newness and surprise. Some see it as a code for an eventual papal exhortation, perhaps after next October’s second Synod on the Family, full of too many surprises.

I’m not sure I agree with the worry, or that a “surprise” is necessarily “bad” if we believe that God’s hand is in all things. And rather than suspect anything nefarious of the Holy Father and spend a year in suspense, I’m taking his words at face-value, and not looking for “codes.”

God really is always surprising us, and leading us to new ways of finding him. The mother of a baby born with a disability has been surprised; she must track new ways of finding God — and therefore the “good” — in her new situation.

These parents whose children have contracted the Enterovirus 68 and are suddenly in wheelchairs have been “surprised”. And now, they are going to have to find God in their new circumstances, which means trying to find the “good” amidst so much that is new, unwanted, unplanned for and unexpected in their lives. Surprise.

When my brother, at only 20 years of age, suffered a massive stroke that left him blind, paralyzed, without speech and eventually without a leg, it was a surprise. What followed was 35 years of ongoing surprises as we learned to find God (and the almost perverse-sounding idea of “good”) in all of it; to see where the seemingly pointless meanderings of God’s machinations would lead. We were brought into deserts, both real and metaphorical, and then into deeper understandings about the value of the life one has, no matter what it’s quality, sense and purpose might appear to be, to someone else.

This touches on the whole idea of God always, always, always bringing the “good”, and the positive, and the wholesome, and the creatively powerful, out of what first surprises us as something irredeemably “bad”, or “unjust”, or even “evil.”

I’ve been touched by evil, and know whereof I speak. I am, many decades later, still processing the exposure, still trying to extricate myself from its suffocating, debilitating effects, still pondering where God was, and in the fullness of time, where he “is” in all of it.

What I know for certain is that the evil that touched me is of ancient origin, as old as Eden itself, and it has played out for century after century, upon familial and social wavelengths impossible for me to fully track.

In the same way that I can look at a picture of my German great-grandmother and find my own chin and jowls and cheekbones, but know nothing of the woman, or the life-dynamics, that careened her wave into mine, I can imagine the actions of an ancestor from some impoverished middle-age village, still echoing a faint tremor within my own vibration, and beyond.

It is precisely because I cannot track this endless reverberating arc, and yet know it is extant, that I can utterly and completely believe with paradoxical certainty that this arcana is of God, permitted by yes, a God of Surprises, for my surprising good. The effects of whatever tremulous positives or negatives I have added to the wave will commingle with the rest, rolling forward beyond my own existence, through my children’s, toward whatever eventual plan God has already put forth and completed.

And all of that is true of your life, too. The ancient evil that has touched your life might not be precisely like the one that touched mine, but its origins are the same, and none of our lives are lived free of it. Your suffering has perhaps not been mine, but you too have known a measure of it, and that suffering — and what you’ve managed to glean of God’s purposes from it — shapes everything, including whether you are currently nodding your head in agreement, or shaking it against.

I wonder, if we thought more about how God has permitted surprises in our lives, we might all feel just a bit more connected with each other, and less inclined to lash out, to bully, to name-call. A little more inclined toward mercy.

God is full of surprises.

Imagine how surprised Mary was, enduring her son’s torture and crucifixion. This is what a grace-filled “yes” gets you? Surprise!

Pope John Paul II was a philosopher. Benedict XVI is a theologian. Pope Francis is a Chemist.

What do chemists do? They “make a mess.” They seek out surprises for the sake of remedy. Muddle up a bit of mold and green leaves and you find penicillin. Pull adult stem cells from someone’s own blood, and there is a treatment for Sickle Cell Anemia. Along the way there may be a lab-fire or even some minor explosions, but the remedies arrive.

They arrive because the Chemist knows his way around the lab, and trusts in the Process of Surprising Remedies.

“Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, Charity in Truth: Caritas in Veritate