Why?

Sometimes . . . okay, often . . . someone will come up to me, knowing that I'm an ordained minister, and ask me "Why?"

Why did this bad thing happen?

Why didn't this good thing happen?

Why is life the way it is?  (Why is MY life the way it is?)

Usually I try to refrain from giving any kind of answer.  It's my experience that most people, when asking the question, are not really looking for some kind of answer.  The question is a way of giving voice to grief, or anger, or confusion.  So instead of providing some kind of answer that's not really wanted anyway, I try to find out what other thing is embedded in those words that seem like a question.

But every once in a while I do answer.  And when I do, I usually go to the place that Rabbi Harold Kushner went in his classic book When Bad Things Happen To Good People.  This is my interpretation, of course, but what I took away from that book is that the reason bad things happen to good people is . . . well . . . because.

There's a story told about a man who was living a really miserable life.  It had been miserable for some time and seemed like it was only going to get more miserable as time went on.  He sought help from psychiatrists and psychologists.  He talked to ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams.  He sought out philosophers and poets.  And then one day, after seeking for years the answer to why his life was so miserable and what he could do about it, the man found himself in a remote wilderness area where there was rumored to be an incredibly wise guru.  He found this guru and said to her:

"My life has been filled with disappointments for as long as I can remember.  One thing after another seemed to go wrong or didn't live up to my expectations.  There has been pain and suffering -- both physical and mental. Things I wanted I wouldn't get; things I had I'd lose.  Why, oh why, is my life like this?"

The guru paused for a moment.  She looked on the man with eyes filled with compassion.  And then she said, simply, "because everyone's life is like that."

That's what I remember Rabbi Kushner as saying -- bad things happen to good people because bad things happen sometimes.  There is no "why" to it.

At the same time as I was reading Harold Kushner's book I was also reading James Gleick's book Chaos:  making of a new science.  I remember thinking that there was a connection to be made between the two.  Chaos theory holds that what at first might appear to be chaotic randomness in fact contains at a deep level a tremendous amount of order and that, at the same time, what might seem orderly and structured has within it incredible levels of chaos.

I thought of all of this because, this evening, someone asked of me the question "why?"  And also because I came across this video.  I think that there's a connection to be made:






In Gassho,

RevWik

The Benefits of a Classical Education

When I was in college I took two semesters of Latin.  I knew that I was intending to be an ordained minister, and somehow I thought that it would be useful to know this ancient language. 

I will confess that I do not appear to have a gift for learning languages.  I remember very little that Señora Delgado taught me of Español during my high school years.  And I really only got two things from my year of Latin studies.

The first is good pronunciation.  My teacher was a stickler for it.  I was taught that in Latin, unlike English, all consonants have only one sound.  So the letter "c," for instance, only has its "hard" sound.  (There's no "soft c" as there is in English.)  The same with "g" and others.  So when you see the word C-A-E-S-A-R, whether referring to the Emperor or the salad dressing, you wouldn't say "sea-sir."  Instead, according to what I have been taught, an ancient Roman would ask for a "kah-eh-sar" salad.  I didn't go to college for nothing, as the Flying Karamozov Brothers have said, it cost me thousands of dollars.

The other thing I took away from that class has had a little more lasting value for my life.  Every Tuesday and Thursday, when I come in to Boston to work at UUHQ, I walk through the Boston Commons and encounter dozens of Columba livia -- that's the Latin name for the common rock pigeon.  These beautiful birds are everywhere -- flying and flapping.  And cooing.

Except that they don't really "coo."  If you listen closely, the sound a pigeon makes is a little more complex than a simple "coo."  It's really more like "coorrr."  Kind of like the beer, but without the "s" and with a little more roll to the "r."

So what does this have to do with my Latin studies?  I first noticed the pigeon's true call while walking to class with a friend one day.  The two of us smiled, and immediately said in unison reply to the pigeon, "Propter."  Because, you see, cur -- pronounced just as the pigeon had -- is Latin for "Why?"  Propter is, of course, the Latin word for "because."

My walks through the park have never been the same.

In Gassho,

RevWik