Everything happens for a reason?

After a productive day of writing, I arrived to our apartment to find a solemn mood among my wife and two sons. I had received a rejection letter from the Harvard Society of Fellows (where I was a Junior Fellow semi-finalist) in the morning mail. I didn’t realize how much I wanted that fellowship and losing it was hard to take. (I cried like a child who just lost his puppy.) Being considered was itself exciting but something inside me had become quite attached to the idea of spending three years doing independent scholarship in such a dreamy estate. Over the evening and this morning I have had heard several consolations and well-intended words of comfort. Despite the best of intentions, one of the consolations I found disturbing was this:

“Don’t worry Sam. Everything happens for a reason.”

It seems that many take this as a form of devotion or a practice of faith. People often expect that because I believe in God that I have an instant coping mechanism for dealing with disappointment and suffering in this maxim. But I do not. I find this rationalization to be a way to avoid, not embrace, the mystery of God. If we demand that God only act with (our) reasons, then, we can comfort ourselves with the confidence that is expressed in the hymn “Blessed Assurance.” And this hymn bothers me for the very same reasons.

Is God required to be reasonable?  Who commands that requisite? Does God self-impose it or do I? What about Job or those who suffer by no fault of their own? Do we tell the homeless, the starving, and the Paschal Victim to not worry because, “everything happens for a reason”? Is the Passion rigged by the reasonability of the Resurrection or are they both quite strange and mysterious to us? No wonder so many find atheism as the only response to deep suffering.

The challenge I am faced with by not getting I want or what I feel that I deserve from hard work or alike is this: To simply accept that things are and God is. To accept, believe, and act with the the belief that God remains and is sufficient—even as I find little to no evidence of it. Does God truly suffice? Or does God require reasons to sustain its Godliness? 

Did God determine my failure? Did I partly determine it through something I did or didn’t do? Or, is this just the sorrowful way of the world, the via dolorosa of being human? A way that is painful but pregnant with beauty and new life; or a reasonable way that makes sense and protects my heart from uncertainty?

In my own arrogant sorrow I am drawn away from some logical reason for it all and towards the absurd: the sufferings of those who suffer more in earnest than I do, with fewer reasons than I don’t have. To the Cross. To Kyle’s recent loss of a child. To my committee member who is in the hospital. To those whose burden is greater than mine. None greater than the Cross of Christ.

That Cross is not reasonable or rational, indeed it is absurd and ridiculous in the eyes of finite humanity. But my faith is pushed beyond the reasonable and into the excess that is Christ’s love that utterly saturates (and even causes?) my pain. 

I am humbled by the sheer lack of reason or logic there is to be found. But hidden in that void of unreasonability is a God that is greater than any effort of the intellect or the imagination. It is the mysterious darkness that is God. 

And this true God has no reasons that I could ever utter, understand, or imagine. This brings my heart great comfort and rest and real discomfort and restlessness.

Our hearts are restless… Let us not try to escape as peace is only possible within mystery.