Deliver Me From Nowhere

Twentieth century psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that each person lived out myths, archetypal stories, across their lives. Key to individuation—reaching your highest potential—is recognizing which myth you‭ ‬are acting out.

When my dad passed away from cancer, I had recently turned twenty years old. That is, statistically speaking, a very young age to lose a parent. Nevertheless, his death fit the natural order. You watch your parents pass, and you carry the fire forward. Such is the way of life. Although I didn’t articulate it to myself in these exact terms at the time, I knew what Jung taught and realized that the myth I was carrying out was that of Horus and Osiris, Perseus and Zeus, even Pinocchio and Geppetto: pulling my father from the deep. Carrying on his virtues, shedding his vices. Understanding that this was my myth to live out, and acting as such, led me to write "The Hyacinth Girl," one of my first short stories I think is worth reading.

Esoteric as it may be, this mythological framing oriented me in the world.

But when my older sister got cancer, just five years after our dad had died of it, I reacted the opposite way. I felt no call to adventure. It just felt cruel and arbitrary. Old Testament judgment over New Testament hope. There was no myth to slot this terrible new chapter into.

With no narrative to identify with, I was destabilized, and I could not find solace in the usual maxims of Christianity about "everything happening for a reason." What did any of this mean? Why did God let this strike my family again?

There’s a meme I see circulated around social media by my fellow Christians:

It’s always treated as an epic own of the “fedora atheists,” garnering lots of upvotes and comments like “I always just tell these people to go read Saint Thomas Aquinas!”

To many fundamentalist Christians, theodicy has already been discussed for two thousand years by a bunch of old dead guys, so clearly it's no use asking the question now. And if there’s one thing that fundamentalist Christians don’t like, it’s people asking questions. Questions, after all, “open the door for the devil.”

This meme is a remarkably uncharitable view of the question, and I've come to think it's more an indictment of he who mocks the question than he who asks it. Specifically, this person has been so insulated from arbitrary tragedy and suffering that they don't have the empathy to understand why it’s a valid question. They haven't had to contend with it. As Christians, we should be interrogating our faith. Wrestling with God. Not Pharisaically hearkening back to convenient, prepackaged responses. But humans naturally take the route of least resistance, so most won't do this until a personal catalyst forces it.

Having been embedded in a more-or-less fundamentalist Christian community my entire life, axioms like “reasoning is of the devil” were things I heard preached without a hint of irony over the pulpit many times over the years. It’s no surprise, then, that any questions about theodicy or why bad things happen to good people were just met with rebukes, if acknowledged at all.

So when my sister was diagnosed with cancer, I was ill-equipped to process it. After all, nothing I heard in church growing up felt like a sufficient answer, nor could I fit the situation to a myth this time around. I began to question God. Not His existence, but His benevolence.

I spent the time my sister was in treatment contending with questions of theodicy. The problem of evil. Wrestling with God. 

But alongside that, I also felt a stronger pull toward art and story than ever before. Before long, I noticed that the way I consumed art changed. For the first time, I was seeking an answer, not just enjoying it. A mercurial spirit flitting my attention to and fro but triangulating on one point: why do bad things happen to good people? And can we find meaning in it?

Several works stood out.

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky. The intellectual Ivan and his pious brother Alyosha. The Grand Inquisitor. Need I say more?

The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Father and son, each the other world’s entire, walking through the apocalypse. Remnants of the horseriders. They seek others who carry the fire.

The River, Flannery O’Connor. A child’s search for meaning is his undoing.

Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen. No matter the circumstance, people find some reason to believe.

I kept writing more of my own stories that touched on these themes. "Jupiter’s Fairy," an epistolary story (read: suicide note) addressed from brother to sister about how he failed to find meaning in her loss. "American Shaman," a bizarre dream I had whose meaning distills to: What happens when you get too attached to your own idea of what meaning is? To what lengths will you go to manifest it?

As I read and wrote, these stories all converged on one solution that finally let me resolve this tension within myself:

The question of theodicy cannot be answered through rhetoric. The only answer is Alyosha's kiss. It is the man leading the boy through a carbonized wasteland, teaching him to carry the fire. It is the roughrider’s son in "The Hyacinth Girl," mounting the bull, being thrown to earth, and mounting again, all in the name of legacy.

It is Adam eating the fruit that Eve offered, simply so he could stay with her.

It is Jesus washing the feet of the man He knew would betray Him.

Christians fail to exemplify the love of Christ when they mock those who ask how tragedy can exist in a world created by a benevolent god. It’s a valid question. There’s no answer. Not really. Evil exists. And no exegetic, theological, or rational response can satisfy that tension in the individual. You won’t always be able to see how things “work together for good.” Not here on Earth, and maybe not ever. That’s not the point. Theodicy is a question of faith and nothing else. And so resolving the problem of theodicy is a wholly personal undertaking. For me, resolving it was the radical, irrational, and self-destructive acceptance of choosing to love and find meaning in a terrible existence even when there’s no good reason to. And the only way to capture this truth is through stories. Such is their value. Stories convey the moral truths that cannot be articulated.